Analysis of the opening of Anchorman

The film starts of with an establishing shot, of a city. Soft non diegetic music is played in the background, as well as non diegetic sound of a narrator speaking. A helicopter appears in the scene. A high angle shot of the helicopter is shown; the helicopter has San Diego written across it. This tells the audience that the film is located in the city of San Diego. The narrator then says “This was an age when ugly men were allowed to read the news.” The following shot is a mid shot of the helicopter landing right in the middle of a busy road. This along with what the narrator said gives away the genre immediately; which is a comedy.
A close up of Ron Burgundy’s (Will Ferrell) foot coming out of the helicopter is shown, as soon as his foot touches the ground, the soft non diegetic music changes into more lively non diegetic music, the narrator is still continuing his speech. Natural lighting is used when they are filming on location.
The following several shots are filmed on set. Backlit lighting is used when filming on set.
A close up of Ron Burgundy’s wedding finger is shown , his wedding ring is a ring with a logo of his news channel on it. Whilst this shot is running the narrator says, “He was like a god walking amongst mere mortals.” The next shot is a close up of his belt, which looks like it’s made from diamond and stone. This tells the audience that Ron Burgundy is a strange character as normal people wouldn’t have wedding rings of the company they work for. As this shot is running the narrator says “He had a voice that could make a wolverine purr.” The following shot is an over the shoulder shot of Ron Burgundy putting his blazer on. The narrator says “And suits so fine, they made Sinatra look like a hobo.” The next shot is an over the shoulder shot/close up of Ron Burgundy combing his side burns. The narrator’s last words are “In other words, Ron Burgundy was the balls.” The same shot is used but not in focus of his side burns, it’s a reflection of him in a mirror. He looks at himself in the mirror and says “Ummmm, I look good. I mean really good.” He then shouts “Hey everyone, come see good I look.”
Simple editing is used throughout the clip.
By looking at the first opening scene I can tell that most of the comedy will come from the use of innuendos and satire, some slapstick may be used as Ron Burgundy is a strange character.

Opening scene of I Am Legend

I analyzed the opening few minutes of I am Legend as this film is continuously creating tension and suspense and I wanted to research what techniques we could use for 'Once upon a time in London'.



The film starts with the voice of two newsreaders debating about a sports team in New York. It then cuts to a typical news channel screen, with the presenter in the centre and ongoing news messages scrolling horizontally across the bottom of the screen. The frame of the shot is reduced to give the effect that you are watching an actually news programme. The newsreader introduces a nervous looking blonde lady who, through her dialogue (hesitating), is shown nervous talking about the cure for cancer she has discovered. Plus when she answers the question of 'Have you cured cancer?', she gives a nervous sounding 'Yes. Yes we have'. The shot of the lady speaking cuts very quickly to black with a sound effect which creates tension and shows to the audience what the lady just said may not be true.


The next scene is straight away surprising to the audience. Its a long shot of a highway flooded with water with cars and debrie on the slip roads to the side. Also the Diegetic sound of sea gulls is surprising as well as you would not usually hear sea gulls in the centre of New York. The next sequences of shot continue in this trend showing New York abandoned and uninhabited with the sound of wild animals in the background. The shot then Changes to a birds eye view of a street and the noise of a fast car can be heard. The shot cuts to the inside of the car and the first thing you see is a gun. This shows that who ever is driving may need to protect himself. Will Smith is shown wearing a Black jacket and not looking happy as he drives. In the passenger seat is a Alsatian behaving well whilst sticking its head out of the window. A flock of birds fly up at them from the unmaintained road, which again puts the question in the audiences head. Why is New York like this. The scene continues with Will Smith speeding through the streets until he is spun out of control because of a heard of deer. Again, this seems strange to the Viewers. He chases after the heard with rapidly changing shots to give a variety of angles to the viewer, showing the car speeding through a park. An over the shoulder shot is used as he points the gun toward a deer whilst driving. The pursuit carries on until the deer finally get away and Will Smith stops the car. A medium shot is used which shows Will Smith staring longingly in the direction of the Deer.


Tension is created with the fast paced changing of shots and the sudden break in silence of Will Smith driving into the heard of Deer. An interesting opening Scene to a film.

Analysis of the opening of The Dark Knight

The first shot is an establishing shot of tall buildings; this tells the audience the location is a city. The camera zooms from an establishing shot into a long shot, of a window on a building. The window is then shot open. A close up of a person who shot the window is shown; this person is wearing a joker mask. A high angle/over the shoulder shot of the man wearing the joker mask is shown, as well as the building on the opposite side. The masked menace then fires a rope onto the opposite building.
A mid shot of a man holding a language bag and a joker mask is shown, with the camera zooming onto the joker mask in his hand. A car pulls up beside him, which he enters. A bird’s eye view shows two men, both wearing joker masks, gliding down the zip wire they shot onto a building.
Tense non diegetic music is used, the music gets louder as the film continues, the louder the music gets the more tension builds up for the audience. Natural lighting is used, as it is filmed during daylight.
An over the shoulder shot in the car is shown. All three characters in the car are wearing joker masks. A total of five people are wearing joker masks. The two people at the front of the car are talking about splitting something between five people. The person at the back is making sure his gun is intact. The gun represents that, whatever they are about to do, they are not afraid of using fire arms. This raises questions in the audience’s heads. Why are they all wearing masks? What are they going to do? These questions will encourage them to keep watching the film.
The next couple shots are mid shots of the people in the joker masks talking about their boss the real Joker.
The following shot is a low angle shot of the three jokers coming out of the car holding guns and bags, the camera then pans towards them walking into a building. This tells the audience that the masked mischief’s are in control. A mid shot of the three jokers entering the building is shown, with the camera panning towards the interior of the building. One of the jokers fires his gun in the air, whilst the other joker takes out the guard. This straight away makes the audience aware of the genre which is an action, as an armed robbery of some sort is taking place. The next shot is a tracking shot of the jokers running towards the counter. What they are robbing is then revealed as one of the jokers says, “Lets go pal, I’m making a withdrawal here.” This tells the audience they are robbing a bank, as you would withdraw money from a bank. Simple editing is used through out the opening of the clip.

Pro's and Cons for our first outing The Stalkist

Pro's

• The use of unique shots, make the audience aware of the situation.
• Use of the close up shot showed the characters facial expressions.
• Over shoulder shots helps show both people in the scene.
• The editing process helped keep the film flowing and didn't disorientate the audience from the storyline.

Cons

• The actors are wearing different clothes in different shots which makes the scene look unprofessional
• Instead of muting all sound in the scene we could include music to make it more tense.
• We didn't use Mise-En-Scene in the film which would of made our film a better standard.
• At times when filming the camera shook making the shot seem badly filmed.

HELPED BY ANDY AND ROSS

The Title of our 2 minute sequence

During our script writing i was left with the task of coming up with a title for our movie. Our first two movie attempts we only had two word titles all beginning with The, I also wanted to pay homage to The Gangster movie Genre. My final idea was "Once Upon A Time In London" after pitching this idea to my fellow Mitpatarpot members they agreed that this mixed classic American Gangster movies ("Once upon a time in New York") and modern British (Set in Britain)which is the exact type of gangster movie we wanted.

Mise en scene for our film

For our film we need it to look authentic so we decided on suits for our costume. We also need realistic props e.g. guns so we needed to acquire cap guns or bb guns. For the lighting we wanted it to look eerie and realistic and replicate an underground car park; where minimal lighting was required. We needed to find a suitable location where a meeting would not look out of place e.g. a secluded car park. Cars were also needed to make the scene realistic, we learnt this from our research.

Analysis of the opening of American Gangster

American Gangster is from the Gangster genre, as it contains strong language, strong drug use and strong violence. Its target audience is mainly adults.
The first shot is a close up of the back of a mans head, with someone else pouring something over his head. The next shot is a two shot, which reveals that the man is being poured petrol over; it also shows that the man is tied to a chair and is shouting and jumping to get out of a sticky situation. The shouting tells the audience that they are in an isolated place as no-one is replying to his cries.
The following shot is a mid shot which consists of all the characters in the scene; this shows the audience who the victim and suspects are. In this case the victim is the man tied to the chair and the suspects are the other three characters. This shot also shows the importance of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), as he is wearing casual clothes, where as the other two victims are wearing smart suits.
A synchronous sound of police sirens tells the audience that the location may be a city, as most crimes occur in cities.
Backlit lighting is used in the scene; the lighting is caused by the headlights of the parked cars.
A close up of Frank Lucas lighting his cigar is shown, this may symbolize something as petrol and fire are not a good match. The camera than tilts up to his face and shows him taking a puff of the cigar. The next shot is a two shot of Frank Lucas and one of his accomplices, Frank Lucas then throws the lighter at the suspect. A medium shot of the suspect burning is then shown, with a close up of Frank Lucas’ face showing his reaction to the man burning to death. The close up of Frank Lucas taking a puff of the cigar before throwing the lighter shows he is confident about what he is doing and is not nervous about what he is doing at all. The two shot of Frank Lucas and one of his accomplices’ returns, but this time Frank Lucas shooting the burning man. The close up of Frank Lucas’ face also returns, to show the audience his reaction to the suspects death, the camera than pans towards one of his accomplices. The scene fades to black and ends.
Non diegetic music is used throughout the clip, to build up tension for the audience.
Simple editing is used.

The Stalkist

This is the first outing from the up and coming Mitpatarpot Productions.

Location

For our film we needed a location that fitted in with our script. We wanted a secluded underground car park which set a tense atmosphere whilst looking a realistic exchange between two sets of Gangsters. We debated where the location should be and we chose a isolated underground car park situated in Reigate. This was a suitable location for our film as the lighting was perfect and the size of the actual car park which met all of our requirements.

Evaluation of planning

Music

For our background music, we wanted to create tension and suspense for our audience. After thorough research on films with the same genre and listening to music with similar requirements, we have established that we are going to use music from one of the soundtracks from The Dark Knight. This completed our requirements for the type of music we wanted for our film.

We are going to use bits of the music from the video below:

Likes and improvements about The Meeting

There are several things that i liked about our film and some that could have been improved. These are:

• Rather than using the same shots over and over again, we used a wide range of shots. We did this is to keep the audience interested in the film.
• Some of the shots we used were to quick, i.e the shot reverse shot, when the conversation was taking place. We could have improved this by varying the length of the shots.
• What i also liked was that, the character walking to and into the room was not revealed until the conversation began. This made it suspense for the audience to realise the identity of the character.
• The mysterious character theme was kept through the film, as one of the characters just left after his boss told him the task was completed.

Mitpatarpot Productions Presents: The Meeting

A tense thriller, involving two mysterious characters having a conversation.

Ideas for our two minute film

After a lesson of discussion and looking at examples of gangster films, we came to a conclusion that the opening of our film will be about two gangs making a business deal which goes wrong, the location for this we thought would be best siutable in an empty car park. This is because, from our knowledge of watching gangster films a business deal always takes place in a sucluded area.
Other ideas were; a conversation between two people whilst an hitman enters the scene. Suitable locations for this were, a bar or cafe.
Costumes are going to be smart suits, leather gloves, trench coats, black shiny shoes.
The main character will have laid back clothes. i.e sunglasses.

The Departed

As this very good film is from the gangster genre it is full of swearing, drug use and violence. Any Audience who watch the first few minutes of this film can straight away tell from all the violence and language that its a Gangster / Action film. The very first shot of the movie is a black screen with the Words : Boston, Some years ago. This is immediately informal and sets the tone of the movie. The next sequence of shots are snippets of fighting and police trying to control it with the non diegetic voice of Frank Costello ( Jack Nicholson ) talking about the city. The shots shown are fast changing and are a mixture of hand held cameras and medium shots. Some Music is quietly played whilst Jack Nicholson is speaking which gets louder as the sequence goes on. With him still speaking the shot changes to a medium shot of Jack Nicholson in the shadows of a garage. The mise en scene of this shot is he looks mysterious. As the commentary continues he walks slowly and casually through the garage, with the shot only showing one side of him. His sunglasses and cigarette show us that he is not someone you would want to approach. Then the non diegetic sound of him speaking and the feel good music takes over as there is a point of view shot of him walking towards a friendly looking Cafe / Diner. As he gets closer it shows a woman walking her dog and a old man reading a newspaper. This shows that it is a place welcome to anyone. He continues to walk and as he enters the cafe the man working there looks nervous and immediately stops what he was doing and gives Jack some money from the till without him even speaking. The rest of scene continues in this fashion with Jack shown as being powerful as he talks about the mans young daughter and makes the man give the young boy at the counter a bag full of food. His costumes is shown as a laid back man and the non diegetic music helps the shots flow. The positioning of Jack gives him power and the Dialogue used shows to the audience even more how the rest of the characters respect the man. A very good film and click the link to view the opening scene ...