Storyboarding

Our storyboard is 4 pages long; 4 shots on each page but we haven't storyboarded our flashbacks because we're still not entirely sure what we're doing in those short scenes, so we will draw them up and then stick them all together on a huge piece of paper!

A storyboard is what's happening or what is going to be happening in the shot/scene/sequence/film; but on paper. This helps the director, cameraman and other members of a filming team to understand what is going on in the shot/scene/sequence/film and because it's visual, it makes it quicker to film and easier to realise if there's something missing.

Our storyboard should be a massive help to my group because our story can be quite confusing. For example we keep getting confused as to which flashback comes first and which shot goes where, as we're not necessarily filming them in order.

Also we've changed the beginning of our sequence which adds more tension and confusion for the audience, which is exciting! So we need to storyboard this idea as well but we need to use as little cliché elements as possible so our idea will be more original and thrilling. Our new beginning may be difficult to film but there's 4 of us in our group so we can maybe split into 2 groups and film different bits of this scene.
Also, we need to assign roles to each member of the group; for example one be in charge of mise en scene, another in charge of costumes and props, one for the actual camera (movement and shots) and one for something else.

Continuity Exercise

Before we filmed our opening sequence we had to do a continuity exercise as a practise run which showed us how difficult it is to film something as there is so much to think about. For example, filming a simple match on action took us at least 10 minutes to sort out where the 3 cameras we used were going and what would be in their vision.

A match on action is an action filmed from 3 different angles at the same time. For example if a man is jumping there might be a camera filming the 'taking off' from a medium height, another camera filming from below the jump and a final camera filming the landing from a low or worm's eye angle.

Taking off

Below the jump

The landing

Our continuity exercise is 2 people in a room talking about and exchanging an envelope; one character is paying off the other to keep quiet about a crime. The receiving character opens it expecting money but it's actually paper and when they look up, the other character has gone leaving with the real money. Because we didn't have names for these characters and we were confused as to which one was the real 'baddie', it took longer than we thought to actually film a simple extract of it.

Another thing which was difficult to grasp was leaving 5 seconds after the camera started recording before doing anything to enble that we had enough duration to edit and cut. The other character (Alex) and I kept starting straight away which obviously wasn't the best thing to do as there wouldn't be any extra time if we needed to cut or edit.

This was the first time most of our group had actually used a camera with a tripod and it was very confusing trying to get the camera to do what we wanted on the tripod! Also, there were a few angles that were difficult to film on a tripod, for example at one point we had to balance the tripod on a chair which was dangerous as it almost fell off a couple of times!

All in all though we managed to get it all filmed in one lesson and it made us as a group realise what a lot of time and effort goes into making a short (or any) film. This also made us realise that we had to think a lot more about how to position our shots and angles and prepared us for our big task; a 2 minute opening sequence!

Inspiration!

In our group, we have all been looking at the opening sequences and titles to films to inspire us about what to do for our opening sequence.

I looked at 7 films and made notes on their openings. The films I looked at were:

• Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
• American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999)
• Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
• Seven (David Fincher, 1995)
• Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007)
• Delicatessen (Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991) and
• Momento (Christopher Nolan, 2000).

The categories I made notes on were:

1. Representation - of gender/class/ethnicity/age etc
2. Mise - en - scene
3. Use of the camera
4. Sound
5. Unrestricted/restricted narration
6. Form (structure/narrative order/number of lines of action)
7. Target audience and
8. Titles, what's interseting and why?

My favourtie opening sequence of the films I studied was Delicatessan's.

I liked this because it gave the sense it was a really scary film and it was actually a comedy when I watched all of it. It set the theme for the whole film and I personally thought this was a really good way to establish the story of the film.

After watching the opening sequences to American Beauty and Memento in a group, we all decided that we liked the idea of playing around with time and we've decided to incorporate this into our sequence.