Titles :)

Below are the list of titles that we will be using in our film opening:

• James Heath
  
• Joshua Lucas

Both these will be put on a black background and faded in.

• 'Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere'
• 'Produced by Jamie Murray'
• 'Artistic Director Ashley Simpson'
• 'Directed by Joshua Lucas'

All these will fade in on the video in different positions on the video

On Shoot Pictures

Below are some of the excellent pictures our friend Liv took during our shoot, which give a real insight into the working process-really slippery muddy banks included.

Film opening animatic

(arrows indicate the movement of the camera within the shot.)

This is our film opening animatic. Alot of it seems quite bare, just random shots of places, this is because we didn't (apart from in one shot) draw in the peoples/bikes. So in all of the scenes of bits of road and countryside/village there will be bikes traveling through the frame. Also at the start with the long held shot there will be the sound of people climbing, and then subsequently climbing into view. The camera will then follow these people (indicated by the zoom in the animatic) tracking from behind, til they arrive on top of the grassy knoll, at which point we will have a long held shot of the landscape with them in the foreground having some dialogue, this is what the second long shot is (it seems rather boring in the animatic due to this lack of dialogue). They will then turn and go back down the hill and the title will appear, something vaguely like shown in the animatic, although this obviously only a rough version.

Despite these rather large holes, the animatic still serves its main purpose to give some idea of the structure of the final thing and what it will look like. We have this clearly shown in the first section empty of non-diagetic sound then contrasted with the boys journey home with the song playing over the top. This will be the structure of the opening for the final thing. The song I chose is 'Everybody Knows This is Nowhere' by Neil Young, I mainly chose it due to the lyrics covering similar themes to ones we might explore in the film, plus borrowing the films own title from it. However the style of music perhaps is a little incongrous with a british social realist drama so before we put music to the final film, we'll carry out some research into the use (or non use) of non-diagetic music (mostly songs) in the openings of british social realist dramas. This will then at least give us some idea whether the music is appropriate on top of our own feelings about it, it might turn we like it because it's more (possibly) happy mood juxtaposes the harsh realities of the boys lives, a technique I'm sure I've seen used in films before. We will see.

storyboarding and animatic

Over the last two lessons we've been working on our storyboard/animatic.

We started with the pictures I'd taken of the general ideas for shots I wanted that I'd taken from the location scout, Ashley then drew these in the last lesson to form our storyboard with my guidance (Jamie was away), then in this lesson myself and Jamie took pictures of the storyboard and uploaded them into Final Cut where we ordered them, cut them to length and in one case animated it to create the effect of a zoom.

Unfortunately I forgot to bring in the necesary cables to connect my iPod up and get the audio file we wanted to use for the animatic in the final cut file, so we are currently emailing this home to me so I can do this at home (as I have final cut).

This will probably be up sometime tomorrow afternoon with a blog post going through all the various shots and probably a shot list.

we will see

Feedback from pitch

Yesterday we presented our pitch to our class, this consisted of:

- Jamie's analysis of the opening sequence of Juno
- Ashley's genre specific (british social realism) analysis of the opening of This is England.
- Josh talking about the general synopsis, mood board, and some of the ideas we're exploring, as well as trying to express the sort of tone of the piece we're going for. (All these are for the most part detailed in previous blog posts mood board, location scouting etc)

We then gathered the feedback from the rest of the class to our ideas, analyses and other general good points (and bad points).

The response to our choice of analyses was generally very positive, people saying there was a "briliant choice of opening clips" that the "related genre film This is England was a good choice" . they commented how they were "relevant to the genre" and that the "examples [of openings] link with what they are doing".

We also has no negative comments when it came to our synopsis and general ideas for the piece:
"good synopsis-sounds interesting"
"ideas for own opening sequence are good"

Someone noted that we "explained the synopsis clearly and gave examples of shots to be used" and commented on how they thought it was good we'd "made a connection with their analysis and [their] own plot" and that there were "lots of conventions mentioned with 'historical context'", I think this means we have noted how previous social realist films have been made/shot and have used this as inpsiration/an influence on our ideas and shooting.

All this is good because, it probably means our idea is a pretty/relatively good one, as a goup of people who had never heard anything about all pretty much thought it sounded like a good idea for an opening sequence, which is encouraging.



Sort of aside from our actual ideas we also quite a lot of positive comments about our blog and way of working. Two of the groups commented that we had researched well ("well researched", "good research in opening sequence"). One of the groups said the following about our blog:
" [It] showed the groups trail of thought as they progressed from the analyses of film openings, where they got ideas, and then you can see them turn it into their synopsis and mood board"
This is good because this is effectively what we're trying to do in our blog: make it so you can follow our thought process, and subsequently, actions all the way through as they happen.

Mood Board

This is our mood board it's nothing amazing, but we found it a bit hard to express what we're trying to get across with photos of the web.

The sort of feel we're trying to capture in our opening sequence is almost two-fold. Firstly we want to try and capture and express the distinct feel that the Fens has, something very close to our hearts as two of the groups numbers are from this area (me and Jamie). This is the feel of great space and emptiness, the Fens is truly the land of the big sky and a landscape quite unlike any other place on Earth (with the possible exception of the Netherlands).As far as I'm concerned the Fens is as big a character in this film/opening as any of the characters. We also wanted the capture a sort of sense of dreaminess that goes with the land and the feeling of dislocation and listlessness, and yearning to escape the characters have. For this sort of feel we drew on the earlier sections of Requiem for a Dream for this sense of Dreaminess, as shown in a couple of these pictures.
The other main feel we were trying to capture is that sense of isolation, dislocation and almost numbness to the modern world that the main characters experience-brilliantly expressed both in the films Garden State and Life in Translation hence it's inclusion here.

(Ashley made an interesting point that although our characters are teenage and Life in Translations are considerably older, they still face the same sort of problems as do people of all ages in real life)

Final Production Company Logo

This is the final version of our production company logo, enjoy.



We chose not to have any sound in the logo because we thought it would be more in keeping with the British social realist genre.



Cinema makes real life more exciting than real life, in our production company logo the hands symbolise the frames of the camera/film and the much more vibrant colour within symbolises this heightened excitement of cinema. This could be considered heavily ironic considering the fact we are making a British social realist drama. We chose to use a zoom in the logo because it is symbolic of how sometimes the viewer has to look deeper and through the film to discern a deeper meaning. White is also visual associated with cleaness and purity, showing how Gag Reel productions are these things and get right to the point.
The fact the hands are in the position they are in making a 'frame' shape is also very important, when someone does this it is almost as if they are trying to catch a certain moment in time or focus in one particular thing, this is very important to us in terms of film making because in making british social realist films we are trying to catch a moment in time, a slice of life as it were.

British Social Realist genre conventions

After having watched Cathy Come Home and High Hopes, as well as the beginning of Bullet Boy in one of our media lessons I compiled a list of genre conventions and techniques that are often used to create a sense of British social realism.

• It attempts as best as it can to make the viewer think what he is watching is real. So:
- Often uses long takes, which can allow the actors to semi-improvise in the roles of their characters creating more natural dialogue.
- Not a great deal of camera movement, use of lots of long held shots-perhaps with slow pans, tracks or other movements, fast camera movement would draw attention to the fact that their is a camera and subsequently what you are watching is not real.
- No flashy editing is an important part, again flashy editing would draw attention to the fact this is a film you are watching.
- Some social realist films have a lot less non-diagetic music than films of other genres (although this is not always the case e.g High Hopes), this is again to make the film seem more real.
- In it's most extreme forms social realism can become almost documentarian in it's style, this being where it originally grew from, a good example of this is Cathy Come Home which during my viewing of it I wasn't sure which characters were actors and which were real people they'd interviewed, or sound clips from things real people had said. This made the film much more effecting and effective, because the message hits home much harder if you're not entirely sure whether it's real or not. This is the highest achievement a social realist film do.

Stylism/stylistic editing and camera techniques are the enemy of social realism by default.

• As a general rule British Social Realist films are concerned with British people which means the huge majority of the characters are British, be this Caucasian or any other racial group or ethnic minority.
- As a result of this the characters can often have quite strong regional accents, the best example of this being Riff-Raff by Ken Loach where for American audiences they had to screen it with subtitles due to huge array of dialects.

• Social realist films often try and address and discuss social issues, these are often social issues very specific to the time periods they are made/set in.