9. Textual analysis of another opening

9. Textual Analysis of another film opening

 

 

Im an going to do a textual analyisis on the first 1.58 second of the film Juno. Juno is a comedy drama film about a young girl who finds out she is pregnant and deals with this situation in an unusual way. The beginning of the film is quite un usual because its in cartoon style. The first clip we get is a close up of a young womans trainers. eventually this ends up being juno but the fist close up creates some sort of tension and start building up questions on who that is and what is going to happen next. Also on the left side of the clip the tiltes come up in big bold cartoon letters. The next shot is another close up shot of her walking and then again titles come up on the right side of the screen.

 

The Main establishing shot comes 6 seconds into the movie this is when we see the main character Juno and the title of the movie comes up 'juno.' This shot sets the scene and shows us a little bit of a scruphy looking girl walking towards us with in her carton of orange juice in her hand. Shes wearing sneakers with jeans and a red jumper. She doesnt look very special, she looks like an inncent type of girl who doesnt stand out too much.

 

Anothers shot is a upwards tilt shot used to show the scy and the birds flying past all still in cartoon style. Then a mid shot of her face to show the emotion on her face wich seems to be happy and still unaware of the things that are going to happen next. This also introduces the viewers to Juno. The title then appeares next to her face. The then is another mid shot but this time its only of her bottom half of her body and it shows us her causual walk this means that we now know that she is quite a casual person. Titles are appearing as she walks past in the sky.

She contiues walking and there is a tracking shot following her until she finally stops infront of a shop all the cartoon drawings get rubbed out and re drawn again this is a very smart effect and very effective in this situation. Titles still keep on appearing around he. After about 2 seconds standing infront of the shop she crosses the road and we get another close up shot of the carton of orange juice wich she is still carrying around and the camera follows her action of drinking the orange juice. The we get a birds eye view shot when we look down at juno while she looks up at us. I think what the director was trying to achieve was that the camera was looking out of the eye of the birds flying above her. We then have a tilt out of that postion into another tracking shot.    

8. Research of Genre: Drama comedy

Comedy Drama also known as dramedy is a genre of theatre, film, and television that combines elements of comedy and drama, having both humorous and sometimes serious content. Comedy dramas is famous for introducing serious topics such as family dramas, drugs, teenage pregnancies, wars, ets. However these topics are usually talked about in a funny howevr serious content.

Here are 3 example of differant types of drama comedy films Little Miss Sunshine wich is a film about a family determined to get their young daughter into the finals of a beauty pageant take a cross-country trip in their VW bus. Forrest Gump is about a young man who is not very intelligent, has accidentally been present at many historic moments, but his true love, Jenny, eludes him. The lastly The desendant, a fairly recent film about a land baron tries to re-connect with his two daughters after his wife is seriously injured in a boating accident.

Most comedy dramas are serious but in a funny way and the first minutes of the film so the part we are concentration the most on are all very differant because of the wide range of topics a comedy drama can be about however most start with a voice over introducing the charater, modern music in the backround to set the scene, a main character introducing himself to the aundience and a silly embarrasing moment (wich the audience can relate to.)

6. Remake task

This is our remake task of 'The Breakfast Club'. This is defenitly not the most succussful vido we have made so far due to bad quality images to improve this we could have used a tripod and more proffesional lighting to improve the images as they are quite dark and dont seem to be quite steady. We used the original voice-over and soundtrack from 'The Breakfast Club' in order for the remake to seem as close to the orginial as possible. So making this video was definitely a learning curve for the group and hopefully our videos from now on will be more accurately shot taking into consideration lighting, stillness etc. 

7.The Breakfast Club (1985) - Our Inspiration

This opening scene from Breakfast club is what we used to help inspire us for our opening of our Comedy/Drama coursework and also what our remake video is based on. We liked how the opening is just a voice over with a series of montage shots, so we felt the audience were being grasped into the story straight away by the narrator speaking and the main location being set within the first minute.

6. Our film Brief

For our main coursework task we've decided to pick a Comedy/Drama as our film brief. As a group we think that this is a genre that we know a lot about, as this type of film appeals to our age group and the three of us have watched many of these films in our free time. Our storyline is as follows, a guy who used to be bullied at primary school and high school and the film starts with him in the present day, age 30, he is now a successful business man or tries to be and the film is about him being invited to a school reunion and meeting all of his past ghosts and bullies.

Our opening scene starts with a shot of little kids playing in the playground, we then rewind the scene and go back to it from the beginning and zoom in on a little boy sitting on a bench which the audience hadn't noticed before. A voice over is used during this with a man saying "Hi my names Gordon Twiginam , my life never seemed easy, I was always the odd one out but no one noticed, my Mum always used to say where's wally? whenever I brought a school photo home each year" The shot zooms in on the boy sitting on the bench and then it cuts to a shot of a young girl and she flicks her hair and starts laughing which will then be edited into slow motion while the voice over says "ahh Heather Clancy, she was the one, the love of my life, the popular girl, one problem I wasn't popular!" Then it cuts back to the boy on the bench and you hear boys shouting from off screen "Oi Twiggy " and then the boy gets hit by a rugby ball, while brushing himself off the voice over then says "But things have changed since then and I'm a whole new man". It cuts to some quirky, motown music and a shot of a guy in a suit walking down with a strut looking around and people are ignoring him and the voice over is saying things such as " I was the one, everyone knew me, you couldn't?" Then he trips up and everything from his briefcase opens and falls out (with a piece of paper naming the title of the film) and he lifts his head of the road and the camera stares straight at him and he says " Ok maybe I still did make some mistakes" he gets up and brushes himself off and walks into his office with a smile and the secretary says "Oh Mr Twiginam you've been invited to a school reunion next week" and then he turns to the camera and says "and this is where my story begins".

For this opening we would need:

Characters:

1 older adult (male)
A group of primary school children
A secretary (female)
A younger male character - primary school age
A younger female chacater - primary school age

Locations:

North Lawn
Drive from chapel to G-House
Zebra crossing for when Mr Twiginam falls
G-house office

Costumes:

Casual clothes from primary school children
Suit and briefcase for the male adult
Black pencil skirt and blouse for secretary

Props:

Briefcase (papers inside)
Bikes
Rubgy ball
Letter for invitation

Music:

Slow orchestral music possibly for the primary school scene
Upbeat, quircky, motown music for the present day

We thought the credits would be shown on the objects, for example the rugby ball after it's been thrown, when everything falls out of the briefcase the pieces of paper could have credits on them etc.
 

5.Jelly Baby Task

 

This is a drama/action genre for the story, It starts of with two borthers having a fight over money in a mysterious enviroment in the mountains this scenary is used to show the theme this story is trying to develop wich is a little mysterious and in some way scary. The 4th shot shows one of the brothers having shot his brother and the 5th picture shows us a clip of the other borther actually habing pushed the at this stage dead brother into the lake

 

This story links in with todorovs equilibrium. This means that the story starts of with all being well then there is a disruprion, then there is a recognition of the disrubtion, then theres an attampt to repair the disruotion and then there is a return to ''normal''.  

5. Jelly Baby Task

 

We decided to do Drama/Comedy. We based our story line on a princess's love story, such as Cinderella. The girl is lonely in the tower looking for her prince to come and protect her. The prince the main character in this stroy then is spoken to by his noble side kick, and told to find a princess. The Prince then is confronted by his arch villian, trying to stop him being king. They have a fight in the forrest this scenary was chosen because it adds a dramatic feel then the Prince is successful in defeating the villian. The Prince finds his Princess and they live happily ever after this is a simple ending and is used alot nearly every time in a love story but not usually on such a simple basis.

We used Vladimirs Propp's theory of having 8 borad character types to make a story. We only have the Princess, Prince, Villian, Side Kick. Also the use of Todorov equilbrium is also used here as the disruption is shown in the fight scene. An aspect of Levi Strauss Binary Opposition occurs here as the Prince has a Villain.

4.My Prelim Task

Our task was to create a short film of dialogue between two people incorporating in this a shot reverse shot, match on action and the 180° degree rule. We decided that our topic should be something based around school life as this is something we can relate to easily, we agreed on the idea of a teacher being concerned for a student about her academic life as she seems to be concentrating on her relationship with her boyfriend more, hence the title ‘Concerned’. Our match on action is seen first with the headteacher writing out a letter to the student’s parents and then a close up of the letter is shown focusing in on the word ‘daughter!’ The 180° degree rule is used next with a 180° rotation being shown of the teacher and student staring directly at each other across the table. The shot, reverse shot is of the dialogue part of the film, the group and I found this the hardest task of all as we had to film each character saying the whole dialogue scene separately with the camera only focusing on one person each time and then when editing this we had to make sure it all ran smoothly together and didn’t look like they’d been filmed at different times. Other shots were built-in within the film, such as an over the shoulder shot when the student reaches the table and the teacher asks her to sit down and also a high angle shot when the student is walking up the stairs at the beginning of the film. We found these shots the easiest to add in as we’d already previously done them and we gained more experience by practicing and using them again.

We also decided to add in the element of sound, using an orchestral type sound track in order to add some tension into the film.

This is a picture of our storyboard for the film:

This was my first task in my Media Studies coursework. Rebecca, Nicola and I had to produce a short film with as many shots as we wanted about any topic we wanted, this was for us to experience first hand using a camera and to also start practicing our editing skills on the computer. The film tells the story of two best friends being reunited after a long period of time and towards the end of the film the other friend noticing and not being too happy about it. The shots we included were:

v Close up shot – This was of the feet and we edited this to slow motion in order to capture the idea of a cheesy run towards each other

v An establishing pan shot – For when the two friends run towards each other

v Point of view shot - When they are both running

v Long shot – Going in for a hug

v Over the shoulder shot – For when they hug, with some dialogue being used

v Pan shot – Of the two walking off together

v A zoom – to capture the reaction of the friend on the bench

v And finally a pan long shot – of the friends walking off together and turning back with a disgusted look on their face

We decided to use some sound to add to the atmosphere of the two friends reuniting again and we thought the Chariots of Fire theme tune was appropriate for this as its dramatic. Overall, the exercise was useful and started getting us into practice for our main coursework task.