Filming delayed

Our filming process has been delayed due to a number of problems, firstly I had time off as i was in hospital, and second we are using 6 actors and scheduling them all for the same day is proving problematic. We hope to complete all filming by the end of the Christmas holidays. We have also made a few changes to the story line, the music genre is now hip-hop, as this fits the theme of the 'streets'

Reservoir Dogs - Opening Scene

We are taking the opening of Reservoir Dogs as we found it appropriate for our genre, a music heist. I particularly like the way there is dialogue the during the title pages and the dialogue on carries into the opening scene. I also like the way the camera is slowly moving in a 360 degree rotation around the characters. This helps to establish the main characters.

story line & board for our main task.

The story is set in the suburbs of London. Two young men, Richie (Richard) and George, both of musical talents, but still very different in personality are best of friends. They are trying to break the music scene but don't have the efficient funding for it. They take on the job of drug runners for an organised crime boss, his name is Domino, he has two very trusted henchmen, we never learn their names. Richie and George, make the decision to steal the money and drugs they are running for Domino, to support their dreams. Domino finds out, he calls Richie and George into his basement office, they run for it. There is one main narrative arch which is the boys making it to success in the music scene, the second narrative arch is the boys getting rid of the Domino who is after them, and the third narrative arch is on going throughout the story, this is a flashback which occurs after significant events to the characters. The flashbacks consist of how they got into the crime scene.
    We got the idea of the storyline from the Film 'You Got served', which is similar but the two friends are trying to break the dance scene, the money they're running gets stolen as one of the friends are beaten up, The crime boss wants his money back so they enter a dance competition to win the money to pay the crime boss and one of the friends grandma back, also it leads to success as they get a chance to preform in a notorious stars music video.

intro to modern titles

The Digital Era, And Modern Trends In Film Title Design

Every sphere of contemporary life — and especially the film business — has been affected by computers. For designers, creating film titles meant participating in the apprenticeship tradition — learning by doing, on the job; that continued unabated into the mid-1990s. At that time, dynamic openers by Kyle Cooper and others showed what the next generation of design-educated, film-literate, tech-savvy creatives could do. That apprenticeship tradition has largely been overshadowed by the rise of popular technology, the Internet-enabled archiving of everything and the plethora of schools that propagate countless design disciplines. Most significantly, we see designers working like filmmakers and filmmakers working like designers.

preliminary media ''the break in''

My preliminary task, uploaded on to my youtube account.

Analyse the way TV dramas are established in the opening 5 minutes, identify how conventions are used?

 

The three TV dramas I am going to analyse and compare for the purpose of this essay are; Eastenders, Waterloo road and Merlin. All three TV dramas are different but also alike in a number of ways.
            Eastenders is more of a reality TV drama where conventions are heavily used, as it is shown on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and there is an Omnibus on Sundays. This makes the TV drama more of a part of the viewers life, as it is on most days. The opening of Eastenders has now become more symbolic as it is unique and once again a part of the viewers life. The opening 5 minutes is more or less an equilibrium of the last episode or 'the morning after', as we see in the first 5 minutes of this episode, carol has lost her son Billy, and its 'the morning after' the only sound is diegetic and it is of people outside in the square. There are faster cuts as the camera moves to her face. The scene then changes to a family breakfast scene where the atmosphere is more lively and loud, the diegetic sounds include radio, chatter and dishes being washed. As you can see Eastenders has no non-diegetic sounds during the scenes, the only diegetic sound is the theme tune at the beginning.
          Compared to Waterloo road which has more non-diegetic sounds throughout, this is due to the target audience as it is aimed more at youth, the conventions are becoming more powerful as Waterloo road has only just in the past years been shown. Before the opening Waterloo road shows the previous episodes scenes as the convention are weak, this helps the viewer to regain the equilibrium of the last episode. The first scene after the opening is another family breakfast scene, but it is more of a disfunctional family with faster camera movements which connotes this. Non-diegetic music is used as students pour into the school, and the school is downhill from the gate which connotes a negative atmosphere of the school. The shot of the father, daughter and son walking into the school is a slow tracking shot which also connotes a lazy slow personality to the people. Waterloo road uses a lot of connotations in it's production.
          Compared to Merlin which uses mostly dennotations, Merlin is a high budget series, as you can tell due to the grapohics ursed in the opening and throughout the episodes. The non-diegetic sounds are voice overs and music in the opening, but during the episode there is no non-diegetic sound apart from music. The opening scene is Merlin and Arthur running through a forest being chased by men with weapons, the weapons, non-diegetic music and camera movement anchor the idea of them being chased as the music is up- beat and the camera mnovement is fast along with the cuts.

Process of filming our preliminary

We first drew up a story board to get an idea of what we would be filming ,the shots we would be taking and the dialogue. as you can see in the pictures, my drawings don't have to be perfect to get an idea of whats going on, as there is annotations underneath the drawings which anchor the scene into it's meaning, shots and dialogue.

       When we started filming, we filmed in sequence of the story board to make things easier. The tripod also made filming easier, as there was only two of us and we were the characters. Once we finished filming, we uploaded all of our scenes onto the macs, where we started to edit and complete our preliminaries. With the finished product we can see if we want more or less scenes, and our choice is to do a bit more filming and we shall cut these scenes into our preliminary.

http://www.megavideo.com/?v=1WN5WPC5 <------ amateur film made by a group of boys in my old school. strong mise-en-scene is seen throughout this film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub-i_Q0m3M0&feature=related
(10:01) Black Hawk Down.
The mise-en-scene in this screen shot is showing two soldiers being shot at, and the iconic picture of a soldier running through gunfire. In this film there is strong mise-en-scene throughout, as it all indicates towards warfare. This screen shot puts emphasis on to the fact that the Americans are being pressurised as there are ricocheting bullets around them. It has a low camera angle which is panning the soldier's movement through the gunfire (small explosives, planted into the ground).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgUf9hlTnnU
(1:40) Eastenders
The mise-en-scene in this screen shot are weak, as the only thing that indicates it is a TV drama is that fact that two women are shouting at each other in the street. I believe that TV drama mise-e-scene will typically and alwasy be weaker then film mise-en-scene, as there are only a couple of hours to a film, whilst there is months even years to a TV drama.This allows the audience to have more time to acknowledge the genre of the soap, but film has to have the mise-en-scene more concentrated. The camera angle in this screen shot is a type of  ''2 in 1'' angle, as it includes both characters in the scene, it captures the waist upwards of the first character, and also capture the full body of the other.

How does ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ use of juxtaposition effect the representation?

Juxtaposition is used many times during this film, as it shows the contrast between the wealthy and the lower working class. Chris (will smith) is used as a representation of both classes in this film.                      Firstly he is dressed down into a vest and jacket and placed in a juxtaposed environment; an office with smartly dressed business men, he then gets the internship he interviewed for, which puts more emphasis on to his achievement. He is then later dressed smartly and is put amongst the homeless in the queue for the shelter, this shows how distant he can be from them, but yet be so close to them. Another contrast is when Christopher and Chris are walking in the subway after playing basketball, and Christopher is holding the ball whilst Chris is holding the scanner, this also shows how close but yet how far they are in that moment.                                                                                                 The juxtaposition between the office skyscrapers and the lower class homes, represent the moods and atmospheres, as we can see the transition of them both as Chris moves from one to the other.

Tyson - Legendary

homework

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4BeN5vsgk&feature=related

The semiotic symbolism in this clip is just that mike tyson is the greatest boxer that lived. The semiotic iconography is that we immediatly see mike tyson and, get the idea of ''knock out boxing''. The semiotic indexical is mike tyson is associated with knock outs and we see knock outs in the clip.
http://www.youtube.com/user/ChugChugification#p/u/4/w_V2ijSSoKs