25/01/2011

We were set the task to pick three out of nine film openings and to recreate them.

For a comedy opening,we chose ‘Juno’ instead of ’50 first dates’ and ‘Superbad’. ‘Superbad’ would have been too hard to recreate using iMovie though it was our favourite choice. '50 first dates’ was just far too easy, we want to be challenged in filming and editing. ‘Juno’ seemed the obvious pick however the background of the opening is a black and white cartoon. We can’t create that using iMovie so we drew the background ourselves on A3 sheets of paper and used Barbie dolls as the actors. This worked surprisingly well. We did the filming for ‘Juno’ today and it took around an hour. We stuck the A3 sheets to a white board and someone would hold Barbie (their hand out of view). This seemed to work well however we won’t know how effective it is until we edit.

For a horror opening we choose ‘The Strangers’ instead of ‘Halloween’ and ‘Se7en’. All of these were rather simple to create however ‘The Strangers’ had a lot of editing parts behind the opening though it’s basic. So we could show our potential of editing with  iMovie, we choose to do ‘The Strangers’. We filmed the houses for ‘The Strangers’ today also. The first fifty seconds of the opening is all done in editing the last ten seconds is split into 4 seconds and 6 seconds filming two separate homes. We found houses that were not connected to others to film so it could look like the stereotypical American homes.

For a thriller opening we choose ‘Vertigo’ instead of ‘Memento’ and ‘The Shinning’. ‘The Shinning’ opening is just a car driving through the mountains. It's dull and boring so we quickly ruled it out despite having planned how we would create it. ‘Memento’ is all filmed backwards and quickly caught my attention as a good opening. It’s interesting that the directors name comes up first instead of last this is used because the film starts from the end and travels to the beginning. The reason we didn’t choose to do this opening was just due to the fact ‘Vertigo’ stood out. ‘Vertigo’ allows us to show some of our camera potential as it includes close ups, tilts and panning.