Research into Filming and Editing

Sound

From my previous research into film openings, I made several notes about different aspects of the opening, In the aspect of sound, I noticed that most sounds that are made are digetict and occur within the opening, This is mainly because the producers wanted to create a sense of realism and used  physical props and environments to maintain the effect of realism. For our opening we don't have the correct resources or any to develop this same effect, Therefore we have to use non-digetict sounds to keep the effect the same. For this our software programme Final Cut Pro X has many Royalty-Free music and sound effects for us to use for our opening.

Lighting

Mostly for our opening, we knew we wanted a majority of our opening to occur outside, although our location is in the open, it did grant us the light we needed. Light effects are the most major importance during scenes that occur indoors, we wanted to create a scene where it takes place in a secret location, we want to use a small room with a table with a single light that can give the effect that the whatever is on the contents is regarded as  highly top-secret.

Screen Effects

We have mentioned that we wanted to make our opening scene in black and white, One of the last spy films to take place in black and white was The Manchurian Candidate, The film was produced in 1962, one year before Dr.No was released, The entire film is shot in black and white, it is about a prisoner of war who is brainwashed into becoming an Assassin for the Communist party. The film itself is rather good despite being rather old and in black and white, meaning it can still do good. Another important film to note that is in black and white is Schlinders list, One of the highest rated films of all time, it gained credibility for it being in black and white and used it signify the time period and later in the film, the colour red.

Research into titles

Every film in the world and throughout history have always had a unique title that has represented the semiotics of the film and what it is about and what genre it belongs to. We have mentioned in previous posts that we are taking a classic take on the opening, including a black and white opening as well as typewriter Font for our opening.

We looked older films from the late 60's s and 70's which mainly consisted of the old Bond films, each bond film has a unique title based around the time period, the later the bond film the bigger the change...

Typewriters were used to write up manuals and important documents up until the 1980's until the invention of the computer. This is why I wanted to use Typewriter font to make it seem more realistic.

Production Schedule

Recently after collecting all research, props and knowing our location we are discussing our production schedule. The most difficult challenge is to make it look like a sunrise is taking place and gives us a much better atmosphere as well as professional and realistic. Our main draft so far includes:

29th December 
On this day we will begin filming the end of our opening, why? well because we are having our opening act like it is morning (but we don't want to film at 4am in the morning) and going into daylight. However we are having a flashback within the opening which will take place during daytime. We will begin filming when the sun is at its best point and we will film in Dunham Massey park. Once we are finished here we need to make our way to Devisdale park and this has to be completed before 2pm when the sun begin to go into a sunset.

30th December
During this day, Alex and I will head off to record the main part of the opening that takes place on abandoned railway tracks. This is important as we need to get it right as we would like the sun to be almost coming over the horizon. This should be around 3-4pm.

1st January-10th January
During this period this is the time to catch up on dates where the weather or personal issues has occurred. 90% of this part of the scene heavily relies on the weather being accurate as possible, The main dates only occur WITHOUT snow, To make things more realistic we would like snow but their has not been any reliable dates of snow during this period of time.

NOTE- These dates are the best suited time for us when we do not have any problems of work or personal matters

Distributors of Action films

Looking for our distributor for our film, we have researched some of the current and most popular distributors for action films, These are the three most popular distributors.

The first distributor is called lionsgate, A popular company that has been distributing since 1997. A modern company that has been distributing some of the most popular titles recently including the Expendables trilogy as well as the Hunger games. They have access to some of the most modern technology they we could use for our film.

Universal are part of the 'big 6' corporations in the media world, on rival to Disney, they are responsible to be part of a successful company that has access to a large sum of funds that can be beneficial to a film.

Paramount is possibly the most obvious choice I would choose for my opening, They have plenty of experience in distributing as they have been in transformers and Iron-man. They are also part of the big six and have experience with Action-thrillers

Props

In any film you will need props,why? because you will not be able to construct your film without any object to signify or create a motive. Some important characters in films have a significant object with them, for example Indiana Jones with his whip or Knightrider with his car Kit.

For our opening scene we several props to make our scene look realistic as well as professional. Firstly we will need binoculars as for our characters will be trying to infiltrate and exfiltrate without being detected, In most Films involving infiltration will  use binoculars to investigate the area and to find a route that suits them best. Luckily I already have several binoculars in my possession already which can be useful for filming.

Secondly, we will need some costumes for our characters to make the scene more realistic and professional. Most of our filming is entirely dependable on the weather, if it snows during our production schedule then we will wear winter clothing, i.e white clothing, if it does not snow then we will have to wear clothing to match the environment, i,e woodland clothing.

Thirdly, In order to make our scene effective we are going to use a chair with duck tape that has been snapped in order for the audience to question what is going on in that context they will continue watching to find out why that has happened. Also in this part we will be using a table with a laptop to act as the Intel that we require and what the opening scene is about.

Lastly, since this is an action thriller we will need to have some sort of weapons, obviously we cannot just use sharp objects or any kind of weapon they will inflict harm, instead we are trying to find something that looks real but is actually fake.

Fonts Planning

In the context of fonts in cinematography and film, The type of font that is used in a film is important and essential to the audience as it gives an impression of the film and its genre. The text is normally shown in the opening to show the director and other crew of the film respectively. For example in the film Fury It has a large yellow title that is shown to have been "War-Torn", this is shown by the amount of smudges and scrapes on the title to signify the impact of war.

Throughout the world of film,  nearly every major film in the past century have a unique or symbolic type of text that is used to con-notate the atmosphere and the role of the film in its selective genre. A good prime example could be The Fast And The Furious. The title clearly indicates its a high-adrenaline action packed car film.

The design of the title could use different types of text to express the film type, For example in films where their are sequels, they mostly continue the same type of font and text to give the film an image and well known to the audience and is used as an identity. For example the harry potter franchise has the unique harry potter text to show the iconic title and become recognisable to the audience.

Representation, Actors and Styling

As I have previously mentioned our opening scene is based within the Soviet Union in 1980's.  Although we have not fully selected a year we still will use and portray our characters to match the appropriate era.

Representations

The main representation is that of the uniform the soviet soldiers wear, A normal stereotype would be the big hat with the hammer & sickle along with a large trench coat which our characters would wear.  Because we are making the film look like it is in the soviet union the biggest stereotype would be that it is cold and  snows a lot which is something we hope will happen to create a more sophisticated atmosphere.

Secondly because our protagonists will be British covert operatives meaning they will have to be wearing some tactical gear with winter camouflage as they will not want to be caught. This may vary on what the protagonist will wear because of the fear that it might not snow. Thus resulting in changing the camouflage to woodland to match the environment of black in case we might take after different style.

Lastly our location in devisdale Altrincham, is mainly to represent Russian countryside when it is during winter, Winters tend to be devastating to Russian homeland as it ends to drop to-27! Our bunker is a small reference to the amount of bunkers the soviets constructed all over Europe during the cold war, in total the soviets built 15,000 nuclear weapons before they were illegal to make. They had to store them somewhere without the west finding them. So the bunker is to represent the bunkers built by the soviets.

Actors

In total we only include 6 different people in our opening scene, This is our two protagonists, antagonist and three other 'extras' that our protagonists will encounter throughout the opening. We plan to only use just us two during filming as most of the characters will be wearing masks to not show our identity's until we show our protagonists and antagonists.

Styling
For our protagonists we will want them to look at lot older and make them see down as they would of been away from home for a long time, some stereotypes include scruffy beards and maybe a few battle scars. For our Antagonist we will want him to look old as He is a rouge General and we want him to look evil in his own way, we are putting an Eye-patch to give the stereotype
of evil as well as the a story behind the character.