Opening Sequence Film Analysis - Casino (1995)

Director - Martin Scorsese 

Staring - Robert Di Nero, Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci.

Opening Sequence Film Analysis - Pulp fiction (1994)

Director - Quentin Tarantino

Staring - John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Samuel L.

Opening Sequence Film Analysis - Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Director - Quentin Tarantino 

Staring - Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth and Michael Madsen 

Opening sequence film Analysis- The Godfather (1972)

Director - Francis Ford Copolla

Staring - Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan

Sound - The first piece of sound you hear is a non diegetic trumpet solo played in a minor key. This connotes a sad start to the film. the next piece of sound you hear is a voice over by the first character on screen but the man starts to speak when the screen is black so that when the screen fades is fades straight to him talking a telling a story. The characters accent is a strong Italian accent and this is an example of a typical convention for the gangster genre as the characters are either Italian mobsters or American Gangsters form the 1920's.

Editing - The only peice of editing i truely notticed in the openening sequence to The Godfather was the fade from the black screen during the voice over. This fade lead to the close up the character who was speaking, the fade connotes a dark beginning being lightened or made happy by the main character.

Mise-En-Scene -  The male character shown at the beginning is denoted wearing a black and white suit. This may connote death as the colour is traditionally associated to funerals. Black is also a very deep colour and could also represent the seriousness of the situation.

Camera- The opening sequence shows a reverse creep, zooming out on the character talking to a mid shot of him. This helps to set the scene as it is quite dark and dingy in the room and it shows the atmosphere more as it shows the darkness of the entire room not just the character connoting the story the male character is telling to be dark or depressing.

Question 2; How does your media product represent particular social groups?

 

I have chosen to compare my own character to the character "Sam 'Ace' Rothstein" from "Casino", played by Robert De Niro. I chose this character as they both rise to power by committing crimes but only because they are very determined to make something of themselves. Also the way in which they dress connotes power and wealth which is something they both have 'earned' and are well on there way to getting more of.

Question 7; Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

During the preliminary task I focused mainly on match on action. We did not show clearly, any use of match on action in our first task unfortunately, but this gave us more room to write about the improvements we made.

The improvements we made are that we have, now, been able to understand the concept of match on action and show it clearly, an example of this is the screen grab below, this shows the scene of our more recent project, and it is the scene in which the door bell is rung, then the shot changes to me reacting and turning to the noise and leaving down the stairs, to me opening the door in a point of view shot from the character at the door. 

I feel that I have expanded my knowledge on editing and film genres. I am now able to use this knowledge to enhance my work and make it of a better standard. Also, I am now able to communicate better with a group and take in every members opinions, which is crucial when creating a piece that you want your whole group to be proud of. Being able to understand more about the editing progress made the experience and task more enjoyable and as i enjoyed I felt comfortable experimenting with things such as precision editor and many different colour changing effects, just to add different atmospheres to certain scenes. To conclude I believe that I am more able to adjust the effects, used to provoke a certain emotion in the audience be it, making our own group feel proud of what we have done, or making the audience empathise with a member of a much stereotyped gang of people, usually murderers, thieves and con men. 

Question 6; What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

We used our phones to keep in contact with each other for out of school hour filming. This also allowed us to discuss our project when we were not quite sure of the schedule or the next steps we needed to take.

This is the camera we used and is the most vital piece of equipment as with out it the filming could not be done. I did take my turn to take some shots, for example the zooming out shot of the radio, but other than that I found it quite hard if the camera wasn't on the tripod as I do not have a steady hand.

The tripod; We used the tripod mainly to obtain steady shots in certain sequences, for example the zooming out of the radio scene, this was filmed on the tripod and it gave a clear and steady shot. Other scenes, for example, the walking up the path scenes, we filmed holding the camera to show the movement of the character we were following. This also help to emphasise the speed in which the character was trying to reach the house in, as they we very desperate to see the female lead.

The macs; We used the mac computers as they had all the specialised programmes on for us to edit our footage. This made the process easier and a lot of the programmes are very simple and precise as to what they  help you to achieve.

Youtube; We used youtube to upload our videos to make them accessible for public viewing to help us gain reviews. This made the process in asking people what they thought about our piece a lot easier. The only thing I could not grasp about the upload process was the way in which you can upload straight from Imovie but as soon as someone showed me, once again, what to do i managed to do it on my own. 

Blogger; This is the blog we use to post our updates and use to inquire with our teacher out of school hours about work due and any questions on the work we have done. this is useful and simple to use and in many ways effective to keep up to date with what my group has done during the process of finishing the piece.

Imovie; This is a programme on the macs and was the main one that I dealt with to edit our final piece. Many aspects of the programme are simple to use such as the time scale editor, the effects and the title tool, but the only thing I could not figure our to its full extent was the way in which to edit music. The music, I would have preferable, would have faded at the end of each cut but i could not work out how to do this so I changed my initial idea so that instead of gradual fades the music would cut out sharply.

Garage Band; I tried to use garage band to shorten and make the changes between tracks that I used smoother but it was just too complicated for me to use. I could not figure out how to use most of the functions and i even found it complicated to find the clips of sound effects that were available.

Final Cut; i did not get a chance to work with final cut but some of my group members did. they did say it was quite complicated but i can not comment in detail about the functions and effects possible.

Itunes; We used this programme to upload music to for our piece. This was the easiest way to transfer music from the internet to programmes to edit it. I found that this programme was very easy to use as the layout is basic and shows you everything you need to transfer music on the opening screen.