Structure of Events
In our opening sequence we briefly see Craig get up and leave the house, before going for a walk to the local park with his notebook to escape the world. Whilst out and about, he sees a fellow gay male receive abuse and decides to intervene, which ends in Craig getting punched. Craig getting ready and his walk are done in a largely montage style, in order to provide a good backdrop to the titles as well as enhance the voice over's ability to introduce the character of Craig to the audience. Following this we have a short mini sequence and then a chapter title. This structure was largely borrowed from the opening of Elephant (2003) which features the same structure of titles, mini scene and the chapter title. Below are screenshots of these features from Elephant.
Sound
On the subject of sound, we made three decisions that can be broken down into the voiceover, the music and the SFX.
Voiceover
For our voiceover we wanted to introduce Craig and let the audience get a deeper understanding of who he was. It was very important to us that the voiceover was plausible and when supported by some appropriate visuals made Craig a quick and easy to recognize character. This voiceover was heavily inspired by the voiceover in Submarine's opening, which is used through out the film to highlight nuances in Oliver Tate's character and his though processes at the time. The voiceover is used in the opening to introduce the audience to what kind of person Oliver Tate is and as a group we decided we wanted to do something similar.
Music For the music we chose to use an instrumental of the song "Let it go" by James Bay. The slightly melancholic melody and acoustic guitar definitely suited the mise-en-scen in the opening and having found it was not too difficult to play on guitar, I produced an instrumental cover of the song for our opening sequence. The music starts with the moment the record begins to play and thus starts as diagetic sound, but as the montage continues it would become apparent that the music was no longer diagetic sound. I have seen such techniques used in many of GoPros youtube videos about music artists and therefore thought it would really suit the opening of our film.
SFX
Finally, for SFX we really wanted to use the white noise of a vinyl just before it begins playing. We thought this would be relevant to the character as currently vinyls have become very trendy, especially amongst more alternative teenagers, such as our main character. We also felt that when the music isn't playing it added something to the mood of our piece over just silence.
Titles
Finally, for our titles we were heavily inspired by the titling of Elephant. We really liked the superimposition of white text on the sky and thus chose to pay homage to this in one of our own titles, however we did not like how they would sometimes put three actors names on the same title. We felt this looked a little cluttered and meant the shot would have to last a really long time to allow the audience to read all three names. We also chose to mimic the wording used in Elephant as we felt it was professional and minimalist, which is something we felt our text should have, so that it did not clash with the background footage. In order to get an idea of what fonts and colours we wanted to use, as well as see some similar titling to our piece in other parts of the media, Phoebe constructed a titling mood board, with the help of the website Art of the Title. After she had done this, it allowed the group to have a conversation about the style of our titles, with some sort of visual aid to help us express our ideas to the rest of the group.
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| Phoebe's Mood Board |
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