Powerpoint presentation on Marley & Me

This is my presentation on the opening 2 minutes (and a little bit more) of Marley and Me


Opening 2 minutes of Marley and Me Presentation

Enjoy!

Podcast 1

This is mine and Steph's first podcast, it isn't a great quality as we are still getting used to the equipment, but it explains out fist ideas that we have had

 feel free to leave any advice on how to improve it!

Initial notes on film openings

• The Bride Of Chucky, (1998), (Ronnie yu)
• Logo with animation then repeated in the credits with just words.
• American flag - this suggests that it's set in America
• Rain, thunder and lightening, which is part of the nightmare, signifies a traditional horror film blue filter and a canted angle also helps to reinforce this.
• Exposition through a sign on a wall 
• Intertextual reference to Friday The 13th, using a hockey mask that Jason Wears
• There is lots of shot variation featured, to make it more interesting and keeps the audience attention
• The film uses the false scare device which is a typical horror convention to build the tension
• The opening scene was 3 1/2 minutes long.

• Maltese Falcon, (1941), (John Huston)
• Lots of exposition on screen through words at the beginning, similar to Star Wars
• Film Noir genre
• However this would only work using older actors.

• Clerks, (1994), (Kevin Smith).
• An audio bridge is used before the first shot, this is diagetic sound
• 1 minute taken up by company production logo's
• Black and White
• Cutaway shots are used to break up the scenes
• Elliptical editing which is helped by the music
• Close up shots of 'things' and not just people, like a cereal box for example
• Point of view shots are used from inside places like a car bonnet, effective and different way of using the shots
• Takes 5 minutes to get into the self-contained scenario.

• Trick Or Treat, (1986), (Charles Smith)
• 51 seconds of production company credits and titles
• Panning from different areas of the room to break the scene up
• music gets faded down when the voice comes in
• first character we see on the screen is the central protagonist
• 5 1/2 minutes to the end of the self-sontained opening

• Halloween, (1978), (John Carpenter).
• 2 minutes of credits
• The setting on screen is made very clear
• Audio bridge of children trick or treating
• Blue filter used, typical horror genre
• Opens with one long continuous take, also seen in other horror films
• The opening 5 minutes is one long take
• Steady cam used to create very still movements and also P.O.V shot.
• The music used interferes with the audiences heartbeat so you feel more tense.

• Anchorman, (2004), (Adam McKay)
• Lots of exposition through a voiceover and on the screen, told by the central protagonist
• $26 million budget

• Burn After Reading, (2008), (The Coen Brothers)
• $37 million budget
• title sequence runs for 1 minute roughly
• The Coen Brothers are linked with Working Title, they are auters and have made films like The Big Lebowski (1998).

• Napoleon Dynamte, (2004), (Jared Hess)
• Comedy genre
• The central protagonist (Jon Heder) wasn't very well known until he starred in this film
• 3.33 minutes credits, but very creative shown on objects such as plates of food, cards, and pencils
• Mostly still frames with no panning used makes the comedy in the film really different.

• Van Helsing, (2004), (Stephen Summers)
• Cliche horror thunder, lightening and rain
• The whole film is based on intertextual references to other films such as frankenstein
• Hybrid genre, made through marketing
• Non-linear, which can be a good code of horror films to disorientate the audience

• Hot Fuzz, (2007), (Edgar Wright).
• fast paced editing is used in the opening montage, including a wide variety of shots
• Lots of exposition is given through the narrator (who is also the central protagonist), and also through what is happening on the screen.
• Intertextual reference to the Adam Ant song song - Goody Too Shoes
• $16 million budget.

My Filmic Tastes

• The last 5 films that i saw were, (1) Marley and Me, (2) Slumdog Millionaire, (3)This Is England, (4) Crank, and (5) Hot Fuzz.
• The last movie that i paid to go and see at the cinema was Marley and Me.
• My two favourite film genre's are romcom and violence.
• My all-time top five films are: Marley and Me, The Trueman Show, Forrest Gump, Crank, The Italian Job (2003).

• The Trueman show is my absolute favourite because, I love the idea of it that there is a whole island that is just a studio focused on one persons life and they build all the set just for this ones guy. It's reality TV to the maximum. I like the progression through the film and the process of Trueman Burbank finding out that all the people that he knows are actually actors and the whole world around him is made up and fake.

Prelim Task and microdrama

This is the Micro drama:
basically our task was to create a short film/ mini drama that used different theory's (such as todorov's Propp's 7 charcter types (villain, donor, (magical) helper, princess and her father, dispatcher, hero or victim/ seeker hero, false hero), Todorov's 5-part narrative formula, narrative enigma, and binary opposition etc) and also included a magic object. 





This task also helped us to get used to the equipment we would be using for our coursework, e.g. camera's, tripod's, tape's and iMovie. We only had a limited time to plan, shoot and edit and we hadn't really done anything like this before this so it's not of great quality but i learnt a lot from doing it.


This is the prelim task:





It's very basic and we used techniques such as; shot reverse shot, match- on - action and the 180° rule. We did this to get used to the equipment we would be using and to see how we have progressed from the preliminarily task to our final coursework product.

7 Evaluation Questions

Here are the 7 evaluation questions that have to be answered:

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge 

forms and conventions of real media products?

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and 

why?

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of 

constructing this product?

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have 

learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Sweding

Sweding a film is where films are recreated and normally unedited and have a single take per scene. the term 'sweding' comes from the film Be Kind Rewind where a character wipes all the footage off the tapes and they 'swede' films to cover up their actions. Sweding a film usually consists of  a very low budget unknown actors.  

The customers in the video rental store really like what they have done and request them to do their favorite films.


Here are my 5 ideas of films to Swede.

1). Kill Bill - i would turn it into 'chill bill'.

2). Hot Fuzz

3). Casino Royale

4). Harry Potter - i would turn this into 'Harriet Potter', she would play quiditch on broomsticks, a girl would play the main character, her spells wouldn't work, i would do the trailer of it covering the best parts as opposed to making the opening 2 minutes.

5). High School Musical

FINAL SWEDE

Here is the final version of my sweded version of Harry Potter (Harryiet Potter)

please leave any useful feedback, thanks.

Coursework Task

THE BRIEF: we have to carry out the following...

Preliminary exercise: Continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.Main task: the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes.All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source. 

The coursework is worth 50% of the AS (same at A2) and the marking (detailed later) is divided into 3 sections:RESEARCH AND PLANNING: 20% PRODUCTION: 60% EVALUATION: 20%

The work is marked partially by the teachers observations and also the approach and level of organisation, but it's mostly its a DVD and your blog that are marked.

Here is the marking criteria for the coursework part of the course; 

Marking Criteria