For the preliminary exercise which we did on Tuesday, my group insisted of Liam, Charna, Tina, and me. Our task was to create a scene in which person number 1 walked along a hallway, opened a door and had a short conversation with person number 2.
This is the final scene Liam and I edited:
We had to follow certain rules so that our final scene would look like it would in a soap opera or in a film. These rules were: the 180 degree rule, match on action and shot/reverse shot.
The the 180 degree rule is a basic rule which is mostly used when filming a dialogue. When filming a conversation the camera must always be on the same site and not crossing the imaginary line. This means the camera is always on the same shoulder/site of the actors.
Picture of showing the 180° rule. (Taken from wikipedia)
The match on action we used was person number 1 going into the room. The shot began outside in the corridor and was continued inside of the room. This means that the shot was completed not in one shot but in two. When we edited it we basically synced both shots together. This is also known as continuity editing.
The shot/reverse shot is basically a scene repeated from another point of view. We used this technique when person 1 came into the room and person 2 reacted to it.
I think we did the preliminary exercise pretty good but we could improve it by better acting so it seems more realistic.
At the beginning of the DVD the the film studio's logo ('20th Century Fox') is shown. After that the production's logo ('Regency Enterprises') The next thing is that you hear music playing and these titles show and dissapear agian: Fox 2000 Pictures and Regency Enterprises present; a David Fincher film; Brad Pitt; Edward Norton; Helena Bonham Carter; Fight Club; Meat Loaf; Jared Leto; Zach Grenier; Holt McCallany; Eion Bailey; Casting by Laray Mayfield; Costume Designer Michael Kaplan; Special Make-up Effects Supervisor Rob Bottin; Sound Designer Ren Klyce; Music by The Dust Brothers; Film Editor James Haygood; Production Designer Alex McDowell; Director of Photography Jeff Cronenweth; Executive Producer Arnon Milchan; Based on the Novel by Chuck Palahniuk Screenplay by Jim Ohls; Produced by Art Linson, Cean Chaffin, Ross Grayson Bell; Directed by David Fincher.
(sorry you have to click onto the image if you want to see everything.)
The scence that is behind these titles represent a brain's neural network. Which indicates that the owner of this brain is thinking heavily.
There is no introduction to the main character and there also is no introduction to the story or anything. I think they are not introducing something because they want to capture the audience's interest by not showing anything other than the brain's neural network.
Here is a screen grab of the original Juno opening sequence:
And here is our recreation of it:
I think that we were recreated that scene pretty accurate. The location is as near as we could get. The camera angle is also rather precise.
We tried to get the location as accurate as possible as you can see we looked for trees which could be in the background as it is in the original opening.
The group I was in consisted of Tilly, Rob, Hannah, and me. We planned, shot, and produced this Juno opening scene. It was edited by Rob and me.
Here is the original Juno opening scene which was made by Shadowplay Studio.
Our task was to remake the opening sequence of the film Juno as exact as possible. Our sequence should include the same angles of the camera shots and the same length.
The location could not be as accurate as the location used in the Juno opening which was obvious beforehand because we could not leave the school site.
The first lesson we had about the Juno opening was about analysing and understanding the opening.
At the beginning what we did was splitting into two pairs (Hannah and Tilly, Rob and me) looking at the Juno opening and creating storyboards. Tilly and Hannah did the first part of the Juno opening storyboard Rob and I did the second part. We included the time of each new scene and if the camera was moving or stationary. We also recorded what Juno did so Tilly knew what to do.
After we finished with the storyboards we looked at the props we should bring in on the day we would shoot the scene. Rob got his skateboard, Tilly got the orange juice drink, and I got the red jumper.
Friday last week was the shooting day. Luckily we had a nice sunny day.
I was chosen to look for good locations which we later used to recreate the opening.
We also looked at the original opening for the last few times before the shooting began. Before we could shoot, though, we had to see how the equipment we would later use works. As I already had lots of experience with HD-cameras while shooting the Sawston Fun Run I knew how to operate the equipment. After the introduction we could finally get going.
Our roles were as following: Rob was the director, Tilly was Juno, I was the cameraman, and Hannah, Rob, and I also acted as runners.
We got every shot except one but in the end it did not matter because we could replace it with another shot we did. The unedited scenes looked pretty good and continuous.
After we finished shooting we got back to transfer the material onto the Macs.
We got to edit the opening last Tuesday. Like we did for making of the storyboards we spit into two groups, Rob was in my group.
We decided that I would edit the first bit in the first half an hour, Rob the other half.
We first used 'in and out points' on the viewer to get every scene separated onto the timeline.
After that we cut the separates scenes to the right length and then we looked at the original opening simultaneously and edited it to fit it. We also added a flashing text with JUNO onto the final opening.
I feel that we did a good job by recreating the Juno sequence. It was really fun to shoot and to edit this opening. I do not think that we had any difficulties at all, creating this sequence.
Our task was to create pie charts which should include information about our life. I created 4 pie charts. These include: % of living in England or Germany (2 years England, 15 years Germany), % of owning a computer (10 years without PC, 7 years with PC), % of living with a dog (14 years without a dog, 3 years with a dog), and % of eating habits (15 years omnivorous, 2 years vegan).
I looked at various student films/openings and found this one intreresting because he uses actual objects to represent initial letters.
I think the strenghts of this opening are that actual items are used as letters. This is in my opinion very creative. I also like that the camera is always set up the same way. The music also fits to the scene very well. The weaknesses of this scene are that you sometimes do not know which item represents which letter. Aside from that I really like the opening scene because it is very creative.
For the film opening task I looked through Youtube for various film openings.
The first film opening I saw was of the filmCandy.
I thought that it would be very difficult to shoot these scenes because everything is spinning and there is limited space to put the equipment.
The second film opening I saw was of the film Watchmen. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=573XmVOdD2Q)
This film opening in particular is very interesting because it is shot as slow motion moving pictures.
The third film opening I saw was of the film Jackie Brown.
At the beginning of the opening there is a lengthy shot which lasts at least 1 minute which makes the audience wonder what could happen next.
I have not seen any of these films mentioned above.
I think that the opening of Watchmen is the most interesting. The style it is shot in differs of what most of the films use as an opening. I think that it adds a feeling to it as if you would freeze the time and also see a bit of movement. It is also shot with a dark theme to it so that it suggests that this film is dark and somber.
As the scenes develop the 'moving' pictures seem to become more and more to actual film sequences.
At first I used Flickr to search for two images that would later on form the postcard. I found that smoke and matrix made an interesting combination.
I used lots of tools such as the Blur tool to make the edges of the smoke picture smooth. I also used the Type tool to write the text. I added effects to the text like outer glow and a drop shadow to make it stand out of the postcard.
The background was sharp at first but I made it blur so that it looked out of focus.
I did not have the postcard in mind as it is now but as I searched through Flicker I did not find electronic things I thought of first, so I decided to to something different.
This is the film opening Chloe and I did yesterday. We learned how to use Final Cut and basic editing skills such as in and out points, using the razor tool, merging sequences aso. This task was easy for me because I already used Adobe Premiere to edit several projects.
This is the moodboard I made last Friday. It represents scene 55 of the film Shifty. Scene 55 is a deal between two people. Because there are drugs involved we did cut out words like "high" and "great deal". The atmosphere in the scene is reflected by bits of rubbish and dark pieces of a city.
