Lauren's Media Studies

Here is the final cut of my film opening titled: 'Insiders'

Last week Grace and I had the opportunity to show our film opening to a group of people (37) who were 15 and above. The showing was very successful and gave us avaluable response and what to improve on. They also insured us that our film opening was of good quality. We had everyone fill out a survey aftet they had watched our film opening. Here are the questions we asked on our survey:  Do you think the sound is effective? Is there anything you would add? Do you understand what is happening in the film opening? Does it make you want to watch more of the film? Is there any way we can improve it? What would you rate the film out of 10? These were the results and as you can see from the pie charts they were a very mixed set of results:

Grace and I have been editing our film for around a month now, and whilst editing we have encountered a number of problems. One of our problems is the lack of transitions between shots, whilst filming we focused on the actual scenes not the moving or change of scenery between scenes. Now we are editing some of our shots seem jumpy as we do not have a smooth transition into the next shot. Another issue we have encountered is the amount of background noise. Due to our location we were unable to control the amount of noise in the background, whilst in some scenes the sound of violins adds to the ambience, in other scenes we have found it hard to hear what the actors are saying and have had to record a voice over, to place over the top of the scene. Although we have encountered problems, we have found ways around these problems. Our next step is to find some music that we both like to add to the beginning and robbery scene of our film opening and once we have acomplished that we are ...

Here is Grace and I's rough cut for our film opening. We showed our rough cut to the focus group and got some great feedback! There is some improvements we will need to make, like making some of the clips shorter and deleting the irrelevant clips, also once we add sound it will be completely different!

How is the future represented in the opening of the film 'Children of Men'? In a dystopian future world where everything seems to be falling apart except London, which “soldiers on”, Cuaron uses cinematographic style to place the audience directly into the filmic world of the characters. Ben Ogrodnik in ‘Senses of Cinema’ describes the camera work as “restless”. We see this in the opening as the handheld camera tracks the protagonist, Theo (Clive Owen) out of the coffee shop in a single long take, documentary-style. As the camera pans right to left from the doorway of the coffee shop, the viewer is given a clear sense of the mise-en-scene with the polluted London street. This unusual camerawork presents a self-conscious style of filmic storytelling, subverting the Classical Hollywood style, where the viewer is also a protagonist. As the camera circles Theo to reveal him pouring (presumably) alcohol into his coffee, people in 2027 seem to have lost hope due to infertility....