Our construction main titles

After looking at many different film opening titles for my research, Alex and I planned out the titles we are going to use before we go straight ahead and add them to our film.
Because our project is only 2 minutes long as that is the maximum, we knew we had to limit the titles we used because other big production films have longer titles altogether and are able to have a long list of names to add.

Even though wikipedia is an unreliable website to base research on, I found a page on it where it explained what normally features in the opening credits of a film. That page can be found here
The first opening credits is a shortened list of of the major actors, producers, directors, etc who have worked on the film whereas the closing credits feature a much more detailed and extensive list which can last roughly 4-5 minutes.
Although nearly all films before the 50s and definitely the 70s, did not feature ending credits and only used opening credits, our film is made in present day so it follows the 'norm' of today's basic opening credits. This norm is:

• Name of studio
• Name of production company
• (Producer name) production and/or a film by (director name)
• Starring (usually the main actors)
• Film's title
• Featuring actors
• Casting by
• Music (usually composed by or original score by)
• Production design
• Editor
• Director of photography
• Producer
• Based on the book/novel by  OR  based on the characters by
• Story by and/or Written by
• Director / Directed by

Variations of these are below:

• Set Design
• Costume
• Hairdresser
• Makeup artist
• Sound recording
• Visual editor

Like I previous stated, Alex and I decided to feature a more condensed list of opening credits but to make sure we followed the ones regularly used and the standard ones to make sure we followed the codes and conventions of opening titles.

Most films, we decided, show their studio or distributor over black (depending on their chosen logo but they usually are over black) Here are some examples from my research I have used throughout this assignment.

Beetlejuice 1988

Inception 2010

Fight Club 1999

Pulp Fiction 1994

The Other Boleyn Girl 2008

Limitless 2010

From this research we created our own 'Studio' who funded our film and created a little logo and title for them over black.



Also from our research..

Limitless (201)

Raising Arizona 1987

True Grit 2010

The Other Boleyn Girl 2008

we chose to include our 'Production Company' and 'a film by' over the first visuals. This is the first appearance of our names and as most film's show 'a film by' we followed this technique. Usually it features the directors name(s). Our whole production is an equal group effort and input so we put our names together on the front to show it is a film we both created entirely.

Fight Club 1999

Beetlejuice 1988

Kick-Ass 2010

Now we chose to show our main 'actors' in the top right/left and bottom right/left corner of our visuals. The right and left would change each time.

We decided to use the important standard titles for our project as by this time we only have roughly 40-30 seconds left of our project and want it to look professional still. We include a casting director, music by, production design, written by and finally, director.

An actor in Limitless 2010

An Actor in Beetlejuice 1988

Castin in The Other Boleyn Girl 2008

Costume in Terminator 2 1992

Written and Directed by in Ferris Bueller's Day Off 1986

Music in Kick-Ass 2010

Our main film title features before any titles first appear. The title will appear at the end of our cold open 'prolouge' (first part of our film). Then the rest of our credits will follow.
From research I found that most film's end their opening credits with the director. We chose to follow this in our production by making our last credit the director.
Examples of film's last credit to be director

Ferris Bueller's Day Off 1986

Beetlejuice 1988

Fight Club 1999

Kick-Ass 2010

The Other Boleyn Girl

Terminator 2 1992

For the most part, we made up names to use in our opening credits, but where we could be honest, we used the names of people w ho actually were a part of our production.
Studio - Purple Mammoth - a company Alex and I created in a media lesson prior to our practical.
A film by - Nadine and Alex - our full names as we are a team
Starring- Gavin Bedford, Fiona Kettle, Sebastian King, Freddie Hitchcock, Phoebe Kudrow,  - Gavin and Fiona are actors we know. Gavin featured in our film but we did not require Fiona. The other three are made up names
Casting director - Tony Stone - a made up name
Original Score - Tom Spall - a made up name
Production design - Leanne McArtha - a made up name
Written by - Nadine - me
Produced by - Laura Skelton - a friend who's name we used as a thanks as she offered to act in our film
Directed by - Alex Matthews - my partner

Actor profile / make up /costume

As we only used one actor in the whole of our production, I decided to write a profile on his characteristics for the character, so each costume the actor wore for the film and the make up.
Our actor is Gavin who goes to our school. This way it was easy for us to get in contact with him for filming purposes. The character in a film had to be male so Gavin fits this purpose. Our age was a rough estimate between 15-30 and because Gavin is 17 he fitted this role. He plays an older character which was shown through the use of costume.

In the first part of our filming, the character wore casual clothes as I have stated before in my research. Here are some images.

He also had to feature some make up as he had to have bruises and cuts over his face to show that he has been in a fight and incident

On the second day of filming for our part the character was dressed in a suit:

He required no make up as the character himself did not wear make up and there were very few close ups compared to the last time of filming.

Narration

After researching different films which similarly featured the narration in the prologue or first scene (here), Alex and I worked on the narration for our film. As part of our planning, we came up with two scripts and spent time saying our script over the visuals itself to see which worked better and then to work on a plan of our entire film as if we were creating the whole thing, to see which would work better as a narrative.


Script 1-
They always say 'what you don't know won't hurt you', but in this instance, 'they' are wrong because it did hurt me...a lot.
[pause]
It's kind of complicated to explain so I'm going to have to show you.
It all started on the day of my job interview.


Script 2-
You that body on the floor? That's me. And yes I am speaking to you right now as you watch me on the floor. It's  not my fault I'm there by the way and I guess you want to know how I got there. It started on the day of my job interview.

Both scripts we created end with a reference to a job interview. This explains why the character gets prepared in a smart suit with a briefcase.
Script 1 is less chatty compared to no.2 and the first also includes a quote of importance which refers to the films plot 'what you don't know won't hurt you'. Many films use a quote in their first narration.
Because the first script explains that they have been hurt in a way, this is a form of the Enigma Code as the audience want to know what has happened to them for them to be in that situation. The first script covers enough information for the audience to understand and relate to the character narrating but not enough for them to leave the film as they will have to continue watching to find out.

Even though both scripts are short, if we include too much information to last the whole prologue which is roughly 52 seconds, this could be dragged out and cause the audience to get bored especially if it ends up repeating it's self. It would have been better if this was longer, but as everything in condensed into 2 minutes compared to big production films, our narration stays this length and in this form.

After a few practises to see which one fitted better, Alex and I decided on the first script for our production.
We used the same actor who features in our film to narrate. This is the only piece of dialogue we used throughout our film as it does not require any dialogue in the 'preperation' scene or in the scene where the character is dead on the floor.
As our school does not have professional recording equipment and Alex and I could not get hold of any, we used the Macs which were available for us. Because of the small room t he macs are in, there is a slight echo in the narration we filmed but there was no way of overcoming this. It sounds a bit too prepared and unnatural because of the quality and actors voice, but there was no way of overcoming this.

Edititng/Soundtrack in construction

Our last day of filming was Sunday 27th November and luckily for Alex and I, our next media lesson was the day after, Monday 28th November. We had a double lesson so we were able to upload and all of our footage and were able to start placing the right clips in the right order following our storyboard.
The week before we had a school trip to visit an Apple store where we had a workshop in how to use the new iMovie. The updated iMovie is different to the one Alex and I used at GCSE and we found this workshop helpful. Because of what we learnt at the workshop, placing all our clips of film into the right order took us no longer than 30 minutes because we had just recently used the software and we had all of our clips we needed.
Here is a screen shot of our editing process on iMovie on the school's A Level Apple Macs. (Note: This screen shot was taken near the end of our editing process which will be explained further in this post)

By trimming down clips we were able to sync together different clips to make them look continuous.
After the clips were in their right order it was now time to create transitions for them. For our film, we decided we would only need a few transitions which would be for the fade to black and the titles. Before we could finalise our film's titles we made sure we had all the music and soundtrack complete on our video.
Alex owns lots of CDs from the company 'AKM Music' which sell CDs with copy right free music on them if you have purchased the CD. Alex and I looked at the different CDs of these that Alex owned and picked the ones that matched the 'Thriller' genre and matched, correlation and worked with our visuals.

The first piece of copy right free music we used is titled 'Look Inside Altrock' for the second part of our film. This track is upbeat but not too excited or loud. It fits the mood of the character who so far the audience do not know anything about apart from that he gets into trouble later on. It fits his character of a laid back, casual, indie young man.
Then after about 30 seconds, the track becomes a little mysterious by adding a few different pitches

(Post on narration here) The other piece of audio we used was the voice over by the actor in our film. This was done on the Macs we used to edit. We had 4 takes of recording the same script in case there was any loss or muck up with any of them and that we could use different parts of each recording instead of one continuous recording.

The only problem we faced when editing was that we could not split the voice over recording but we overcame this because we had recorded 5 voice overs to edit and use.


White balance
After the films were in the right order and the music was fitted in the places we wanted, we slightly edited the colouring of the first part of the film. This was to make the film look colder and cause the audience to feel a little uncomfortable by looking at a dead body. The new software for iMovie allowed us to do this because it features a palette which can select and brighten or darken the colours on the screen. We used a bleak white and blue colour on all pieces of film that featured before the main title.

Time Management

Before we began our production (including research, planning, filming, editing and so on...) Alex and I wrote down a time management sheet which we followed in order to keep on top of all our work to to make sure we included everything we needed to for our planning.

Deadlines
Prelim - Friday 21st October
Main task - Monday 12th December
Main task evaluation - After Christmas hols

Here is the time management sheet we created at the beginning of our coursework.

Like most time sheets, we found it hard to keep to the management sheet because in some instances we finished the research before the time we gave us so we moved on to other tasks quicker and it other instances, the task has taken longer or become a gradual thing.

First storyboard for final idea

This post is late because of technical difficulties getting the pictures and putting them together on a document.
Here is my first storyboard for mine and Alex's final idea.

(Click to see larger)

Our construction main title

Alex and I decided to begin researching film titles once we were under way with editing and the final stages of our construction. This was so we could relate it to our film instead of basing the film around the title.

From our knowledge of film titles, Alex and I liked the idea of just a one word or two word title.
A lot of film titles, not just thrillers, use a one word title so it is emphasised in one word and iconic. The short word is also easy to remember and easy to tell other people about (a way of selling the film). Examples are; Avatar (2009), Inception (2010), Superbad (2007), Limitless (2010), Gladiator (2000), Watchmen (2009), Oldboy(2003), Wanted (2008), Milk (2008), Scarface (1983), Cars (2006), Ghost(1990) and so on.

Following our genre 'thriller/film noir', we researched titles on imdb for the titles of films from this genre. IMDB holds nearly every film title in the world over years and year so it was easy to do our research here.

Some examples we found of various types of thrillers and hybrids; Super 8 (2011 dir. JJ Abrams) sci-fi thriller, Psycho (1960. dir Alfred Hitchcock) horror thriller, Jaws (1975 dir. Steven Spielberg) horror thriller. Super 8 refers to the camera which is used in the film. A character in Psycho is, a psycho. Jaws refers to the teeth of a shark which is what the film revolves round. Other film titles with one word under the thriller genre are; Memento, Inception, Seven, Fargo, Serendipity, Taken.
The title for 'Taken' refers to the action of taking something as this film involves a girl being taken away from her father. Inception is a word which means the start of something but for the 2010 film by Christopher Nolan
 is it a new word which refers to an action within the film. Seven refers to the 7 deadly sins which feature in the film. Fargo refers to the setting of the film. The word Memento is known as something important which is kept like a souvenir of a person or event. The film is about a man who's wife was killed but he suffers memory loss and so he tattoos stuff to remember on his body and takes pictures often, this is considered his mementos. Serendipity is defined as a 'happy accident' which is what the romance film centres around.

Other titles are usually names. Briefly mentioned above is the drama biopic Milk which is about Harvey Milk an American activist. Animation Coraline is about a young girl with the same name. A very popular title which was first created as a comic is the title 'Batman'. The boxing film Rocky is about a fighter named Rocky Balboa. Another animation film, Shrek, has the main character with the same name.

We thought about this and liked the idea of the name of our actor (Gavin) but spelt in a different way.

Gavyn - We liked this idea as it look unusual, bu after research we found that this is a common spelling for the name in certain parts of the world and so it would not have the same impact all across the world.

Full Blast - Even though this title is two words, it's a short title and implies that there would be explosions, deaths and guns used in the film which reflect ours genre. This was our title for a few days and when it came to editing, we tried the title out on our film but we found it did not match with what the visuals were representing.

Inspector - This was our final title idea. Inspector connotes to suits and people in business which is what our main character is involved in. The title and it's connotations fits in with the thriller film noir genre because of the suits and upper class characteristics. We messed around with having 'The Inspector' or just 'Inspector' and decided that Inspector sounded better as it stands alone and adds mystery because the main character isn't necessarily the Inspector.

Research - Titles

As the project requires the titles of the opening of a film, I looked at the different titles of films in general.
I looked at their names and their relevance to the film and how they are presented (font, style, etc..) and showed at the start (or end) of the film.

(1988. dir Tim Burton) The Beetlejuice titles are over back and have a logo styled title which refers to the plot of the film.

Ghouls, ghosts, etc..

Previous research on Beetlejuice

 (1986 dir. John Hughes) The title for Ferris Bueller's Day Off is very simple, over black and in bright blue font. The font is styled in a outgoing way compared to a posh or very formal one.


Previous research

(1999 dir. David Fincher) Fight Club uses special effects in it's titles which follows the same formatting as the other titles (actors, director, etc...)



Previous research

 (2010 dir. Neil Burger) The title for Limitless appears in a spiral while the rest of the visuals are moving to cause discomfort for the audience because of all the movement. This is because the plot of Limitless is similar to that of disorientation.

 (2006 dir. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris) The Little Miss Sunshine titles are simple. After a short cold opening which introduces the characters of the film, the title appears in a simple font over one of the character's faces.


Previous research

(1960. dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

The titles for Psycho are in black and white because the film is but there are some transitions over the title before it appears. This not only follows a design that the director, Alfred Hitchock, used in a lot of his films, but it connotes to the mystery/thriller genre because it causes the audience confusion.
Previous research

(1994 dir. Quentin Tarantino) The title for Pulp Fiction is very bold, bright and big which shows the title's importance to the film. The colour resemble that of 'orange pulp'. The font resembles the genre of the film which is a comedy, drama, thriller.





Previous research

 (1987. Joel Coen)
The title for Raising Arizona is very clever because it is over black  but silhouettes the background of a sunset which uses very warming, comforting colours.


Previous research

 (1959 dir. Billy Wilder)
 The Some Like It Hot titles are in black and white because the film is and they use a very fun font. This shows that the genre of the film is a comedy.

(1991 dir. James Cameron) The titles for Terminator 2 Judgement Day (ignore the title for Linda Hamilton) show the genre because the titles are printed on metal (the metal represents the terminators/robots). The fire below also symbolises that the film could foreshadow deaths and destruction which is in the sci-fi genre.

 (2008 dir. Justin Chadwick)
 The titles for The Other Boleyn Girl are very simple, over the visuals but with a few lens flares to focus on the title. The title itself uses a very simple font in capitals which shows it's importance.


Previous research

 Over black, the titles for True Grit (2010 dir. Ethan and Joel Coen) are simple and yet show the genre. The font is similar to that commonly used a few years back and is similar to that of Westerns because the film is a western.

Previous research

(2006 dir. James McTeigue) The titles for V For Vendetta are over the visuals of the letter V in fire. This represents the film. After a cold opening which introduces Guy Fawkes, the film's title hints to more explosions and destruction. The red symbolises death and love and the capitals for 'VENDETTA' show it's importance.

Previous research