Analysis of Se7en Opening Scene

We decided to analyse the film "Se7en". We chose Se7en because we knew it was a thriller and it followed a similar distant opening. The opening scene throughout has the use of both digetic and non-digetic sound which is similar to our film opening. We felt that the use of dynamic images gave this film opening an edge that many others did not. 

Film Opening Analysis- Quantum of Solace

Gunshot Test

Seeing as there is going to be a gun in the video, I thought I would test some gun shot effects. I knew it had to look realistic and therefor had to think about a number of things:

Muzzle Flare
Flash from the gun
Where the flash will light up
Gun sound effect
How it would effect James and the surroundings
Smoke from the shot

Firstly what I did was create the muzzle flare which only had to last 1 frame. I looked at shoot out scenes from action films such as "The Bourne" films to see how large the muzzle flash was and how long it had to last. I then created the flash by adding in a colour effect. The flash wouldn't hit everything so I masked out areas that the light from the flash would hit, for example James's face, his hand, stomach and the fence behind him. The smoke was a clip I found which originally had a black background but I was able to screen it out, only leaving the smoke. The sound is a simple gunshot sound which I matched with the timing of the muzzle flare.

Obviously in the final version we will not use a nerf gun but if we can make it look convincing with a nerf gun then I think we can make it look great with a realistic pistol!

Here is the gunshot test video:
Gun Shot Test

Costuming for Second Film Idea

Costume

Due to our change in film idea, we have two characters that we need to plan costumes for.
We want one of the costumes to be a suit to show that the man is smart and in control. This will also show he is a "hitman" like figure. After doing some research, we thought that the suit would be good for the genre. Films that fit this genre such as James Bond, often have the main character in a suit. It shows their superiority of the character. This is shown in the pictures below:

For our second man, the victim, we decided that we wanted him to be simple dressed in jeans/trousers and a top. This is because it is just a 'normal' man and, therefore, would be dressed in normal everyday clothes. We may make his hair scruffy and damp to make it look like he is sweaty from being nervous as this will add effect to the whole film. This would also show his inferiority as he is being threatened and cannot do anything about it.

Location Change

Location Change

Because we are changing our film due to a poor response at the viewing, we have to find a new location. We know that we want it in a film because this is a simple yet effective place to film an action thriller; which is our new film genre. We have found two fields that we could use as they are at Tiffany's house. These are in the pictures below:

Field 1:

 Filed 2:

After showing the group the two choices of fields, we decided that field number 2 was the best. This is because of two reasons. Firstly because, at the edge, there are the steps, in the picture below. We thought that these would be very useful to use to film our long shots from because there is a sturdy base to put the camera. Also when looking at the shot through the camera, it looked exactly like what we had drawn on our story board.

Another reason that we chose this field is because it has a mount in the middle, as shown in the picture below. Even though we had not planned on using something like this in the story board, we thought that it would add more effect and make the all of the shots look better than if it were to be simple on grass.

What is an action thriller?

http://slides.com/tiffanypocock/action-thrillers

Why did we change our idea?

In this video we voiced over some scenes of our first draft that our audience didn't like or something that we weren't happy with and wanted to change. We explained why we didn't like them and what we would do to improve it.

Voice Over Video - Click Me!

20th Century Fox Intro Gun Shot Edit - James

Jak came up with an idea to have our own movie intro related to our genre. He got the idea from the Simpsons intro to change it slightly and make it original to our genre and film opening. Using this inspiration that Jak gave us, James decided to test it out.......................


Intro Gun Edit

Inspired by The Simpsons movie intro I (James) decided to play around with gun shot effects as this is what happens in our film opening. I edited in gun shot sounds and a smoke effect to make it seem like someone was shooting at the logo. At the end I then edited the footage so it looked damaged and broken. This isn't our final piece but James and Jak will evolve the idea and make it look a bit more professional.

Our Film Distribution

As our film genre is an action thriller, we did some research into 'Taken' as the genre of this is the same as ours. We found out that the company of Taken was '20th Century Fox' so we decided that because the two genres are the same, we would put this at the beginning of our film.

Below, is the link for the 20th Century Fox Film Intro:

20th Century Fox

Second Storyboard first draft

The process of changing our idea

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