Background music

After studying various style models we have found that we particularly like the catchy and fast paced pop songs in the beginning of the title sequence. In the Lizzie Maguire movie there was an Atomic Kitten song and in Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging there was a Scouting for Girls song. We have looked at various songs on youtube that might be "ironic" to our piece as this is also an effective technique we have seen in title sequences we have studied, that title sequence songs are usually ironic to what we are actually seeing. So we decided to ask our friend lucy to do a cover of the Alanis Morisette song Ironic.Backing music

Logo

We decided to have quite a simple logo. We studied logos from our style models and various other sources and discovered the logo does not need to be directly linked to the genre of the film although this sometimes is the case. We did, however, decide to have our logo brightly coloured and quite simple so it catches the audiences eyes making them watch the screen for the opening title sequence whilst not drawing too much attention.

Style model analysis

Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging

The title sequence begins with dialogue as we see an insight into the personality of two characters who exchange conversation about an exrtavagant costume which is instantly humorous to the audience, setting the genre instantly. The titles begin to appear subtly blending in to the scene alongside the dialogue.

 

We then see the main character in the fancy dress costume arrive at the party and get a bad reaction, this sets the target audience and also sets some background to the character. With a sound effect and then a que of laughter we assume that the character may be unfortunate but at the same time are entertained by this. There is obvious variations in status in this case regarding popularity. There is a certain girl in a more serious seductive costume where as the main character looks unease at her unpleasant comment and stands in a totally opposite costume. Instead of the titles being consistent in the opening minutes we have a scene of narrative and dialogue is exchanged between the characters, helping the storyline.

A catchy pop song begins as the main character leaves the party and now as she is on her own again we begin to see titles alongside the music.The title sequence is kept consistently funny mainly due to the mise-en-scene of her outfit. As the pace increases so does the music which gives a certain chirpy feel to the opening and sets the atmosphere and genre for the rest of the film. As the character runs home we see a deep insight into the setting of the film as she runs through the streets by the seaside.

The fun and quirky font is the same colour throughout and sometimes blends into the scene but is recognisable and placed well against contrasting coloured backgrounds. The range of close up, medium and wide shots allows the audience to see the geograhical setting of the film whilst also seeing medium shots of the people who are there and the emotion of the main character.

I particularly like how this title sequence has subtle titles and uses various paces and cutting speeds which are juxtaposed perfectly with music to set the pace for the film. The including of narrative with humour gives us an instant insight into the film whilst not giving too much away.

 

More planning

Here is our shooting schedule. As we have learnt from our preliminary: planning is key. And a particular point of error in our previous exercise was not planning our shooting thoroughly so we were lacking shots for example.

Planning

Risk assessment:

Here we indentified the risks that could be involved with the narrative of our title sequence and then established ways in which we could control these and put things in place to avoid accidents.

Narrative:
Our title sequence involves a boy on his daily morning routine which is quite basic and recognisable by the target audience. We see the character face consistent bad luck throughout the title sequence as he tries to go about his daily routine but faces obstacles and misfortune. As the character sets about leaving the house we see his journey and then when he is outside we hear him recall and have a flashback of this weekeneds lottery draw and go to his pocket to check his own ticket, as we have just seen the characters great misfortune consistently throughout the sequence we now see him win the lottery which contrasts greatly.
Script:

Roles of the group:
Elise- My role was to figure out a concept and create the ideas and story behind the title sequence such as: making a storyboard and putting the initial ideas down then developing them to make them possible to be in a title sequence.

Beth- Beth's role was deciding how we were going to make the concept a reality such as considering the risks and how it would fit together organising a timeline etc.

Research!

Target audience - teenagers
Teen films is a film genre targeted at teenagers and young adults in which the plot is based upon the special interests of teenagers, such as coming of age, first love, rebellion, conflict with parents, teen angst or alienation. Often these normally serious subject matters are presented in a glossy, stereotyped or trivialized way. Some teen films appeal to young males while others appeal to young females.
Films in this genre are often set in high schools, or contain characters that are of high school age. Sexual themes are also common, as are crude forms of humor.

Codes and conventions:
Codes and conventions of teen films vary depending on the cultural context of the film, but they can include proms, alcohol, illegal substances, high school, parties and all-night raves, losing one's virginity, relationships, social groups and cliques, and American pop-culture.
The classic codes and conventions of teen film come from American films where one of the most widely used conventions are the stereotypes and social groups. The wide range stereotypes most commonly used include:

• The Jock/Cheerleader e.g Grease
  
• School Divae.g Sharpay in High School Musical
  
  
• The Geek/Nerd
• The Rebel
• The Misfit, or The Outcast
• The Average Girl/Boy (the boy/girl next door) e.g Lizzie McGuire in The Lizzie McGuire Movie
  
• The New Girl/Boye.g Gabriella in High School Musical
  
  
• The Loner
• The Band Geek

Apart from the characters there are many other codes and conventions of teen film. These films are often set in or around high schools as this allows for many different social cliques to be shown. This is different in hybrid teen films, but for the classic romantic comedy teen film this is almost always the case.

Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teen_film

Genre - comedy
Comedy film is a genre of film in which the main emphasis is on humour. These films are designed to elicit laughter from the audience. Comedies are generally light-hearted dramas and are made to amuse and entertain the audiences. The comedy genre often humorously exaggerates situations, ways of speaking, or the action and characters.
Films in this style traditionally have a happy ending.

Taken from: wikipedia

Comedy Conventions:
Settings:

• Dependent on the type of comedy
• Generic places: Brightplaces, towns, cities, well populated areas,.
• Teen comedy:Highschools, small towns e.g The Lizzie McGuire Movie is based in a high school. 

Technical Code:

• Camera is very natural and goes along with the characters. Can do high shots to capture the whole environment.
• Medium shots the catch all the characters expressions.
• Editing sounds to add humour.

Iconography:  

Bright colours, blue and yellow are often used.

Lighting is often bright. shot during day time.

Character types:

• idiots, very stupid, very accident prone.
• Smart people, socially awkward.
• Regular people, accidents occur around them. They can be sarcastic.

E.g The Inbetweeners movie has four main characters who are very stupid and accident prone. They often get themselves into bad situations.

Planning

Here are some examples of how we have been planning our title sequence. We have finished planning the concept and considering actors and props and have now moved on to planning when and where we are going to do the shooting. Below are pictures of things we need to collect before we begin filming, what we need to record seperately with a voice recorder and what days we are going to do things. We realised in our preliminary exercise we did previously that we needed to do more thorough planning as we struggled previously with forgetting to do shots because we hadnt completed a shooting schedule for example.

storyboard!

Here is a brief storyboard we created to help us plan how our title sequence was going to run, what order would work best and how to include a range of shots. From this storyboard we have since added shots and changed it around a little to hopefully make the sequence more consistent and run more smoothly whilst also being more technically correct.

Analysing style model

The Lizzie Maguire Movie has a particularly unique opening scene that we have chosen to use this as a style model and use some of the techniques in our title scene.

In the title sequence the music begins immediately where we are presented with the character animation of the main character that was used also in the television series that the film has been created from. The first thing the animation does is reveal a name of someone and so the titles begin almost immediately aswell. The use of incorporating the names of the people involved into the opening sequence so they are not just on the screen whilst other things are happening, instead, being involved in the opening sequence is particularly unique and an idea we plan to use. The names that are shown with the animated character all come onto the screen from an action that the animation does and usually this is an accident or mistake, for example, the character pulls down on something leading to a blanket falling onto her head that has a name on. This involves the titles into the sequence whilst also making the involvement of the names entertaining and commerical as the names are usually linked with the animated character having bad luck.

The names are in a thick, fun and informal font and are in bright colours which makes the names more aesthetically pleasing and draws the attention to the names instead of blending into the scene and not being very recognisable, which is sometimes seen in other title scenes. When we leave the animation and see the main character we see her dancing around her room and singing to the music which makes the music seem very natural in the scene instead of synthetic. The character acting very naturally in her bedroom makes it seem as if she is unaware that the camera is watching her and this makes it seem very voyeuristic.

The use of a popular music song makes the title scene catchy and entertaining to its target audience that is tennagers as they are probably familiar with this chart topping song. We were particularly interested in the way that the names are intertwined with props and the names do not simply appear in font on the screen but instead are triggered by something from the animated character. The props that trigger the names are very relevant to the main character who we see dancing around her stereotypical girly bedroom trying on clothes which shows consistency and makes the titles stand out.

The title scene is reasonably fast paced and this coincides with the song that also has a change in tempo which again shows consistency. The voyeurism is reinforced by the cut scenes to the brother who is following his sister with a toy car and videoing her, this makes the audience laugh as we see a stereotypical brother and sister relationship and have an inkling that something is about to happen, which many expect to be her catching the toy car. The colours of the names in the title scene always link to another colour in the shot such as her top which makes the name blend in aswell as standing out on a usually dull canvas.

We decided to use the ideas and methods from the animated character aswell as the main character but as we weren't to use animations in ours we will be combining the techniques to be used by the main character. The misfortune and bad luck of the animated character makes the title scene thoroughly entertaining and the use of the names with the props that are so consistent with the story of the main character particularly appealed to us. We were also interested in using a similair technique of the main character and how natural the scene seems with the camera almost feeling as though it is watching her being natural in a relaxed setting that is her bedroom. The misfortune of the main character is used in a climax at the end of the title scene and from the previous television series many people know she is an unfortunate character, we would like this to be shown in our title sequence as the running theme is misfortune. The use of humour, music and the transitions and colours of the fonts for the names make the title sequence catchy, interesting and thoroughly entertaining which we hope to also achieve.

Planning

Here are some pictures showing the planning of the concept to our task. We initially wrote down a rough list of ideas and then considered which would be most effective before writing the ideas we wished to use again and placing them in the order we would like them to appear. We then began drawing a rough story board so we could position different scenes with various shots together to make them look most effective. After the first lesson we have decided on a concept and what we wish to include shown visually through a storyboard.

Preliminary Evaluation

 

Our preliminary exercise was called Waiting, the storyline consisted of a blind date which had a man waiting, a woman rushing to meet him and them instantly connecting as soon as she arrives. We used a variety of shots and the short film was constructed throughout school using the road, stairs and sixth form cafe. We used copyright free music to help the suspense and emotion of the film.

The first thing we did was brainstorm ideas for storylines and settings and then, once we had decided, we began to put our ideas of what we wanted to include onto a list and ordered them chronologically. Then we made this into a storyboard by placing different parts of the story into different boxes showing how the film would flow and what would happen when and added extra information that might help us when filming. The next step was to add some dialogue and so we created a script so we were organised for filming and could organise things promptly particularly regarding the actors.
When it came to filming we stuck to the plans really well and organised our time wisely giving different jobs to different people so we were using the time we had effectively. We shot the film in around 2 hours and shot extra shots just incase as the actors only had this time free. We shared the workload equally regarding filming and direction.

FEEDBACK:
After watching editing our film we showcased it to the others and got feedback. Instantly from watching it on the big screen it was obvious things needed to be changed, particularly the audio. Our audio had been turned down too quiet which affected the overall film and really the audio we had chosen needed to fit the mood more which was mentioned in the feedback. We also had lots of continuity errors as the film was shot over a free lesson and break so the noise and amount of people changed quite a bit which affected how realistic it was.


SUCCESS:
- storyline, it was mentioned a few times that the story of the film was unique
- camera shots, we also had compliments on our range of camera shots
- editing, in particular the split screen which only we used seemed to be liked
- the mystery character, we made sure you could not see the face of the girl in the film until the end which added to the story and made it more dramatic.. possibly

FAILURES:
- camera, due to the weather a lot of the shots were overpowered by rain and the girl didnt really fit in when wearing a skirt in the pouring down rain, this also lead to a slightly shaky camera
- continuation, this was our main downfall and possibly with more time or maybe more time editing this could have been improved this also applies to..
- audio, we definitely should have done a pre recorded audio of the voices to compliment the film

WHAT I WILL LEARN FROM THIS
- planning is key, our successes in this were definitely due to the time we spent planning
- editing, we possibly should have spent more time editing than filming as this would have meant our major downfalls that were sound and continuation could have been resolved
- acting, I think if we had of had better actors the overall quality of the film would have been improved even if the acting was not marked