What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing your opening sequence?

Eleanor Flower

ResearchWe conducted lots of research before deciding what genre and style of opening sequence that we wanted to make. We did this mainly through the internet and websites such as www.artofthetitle.com. This website was especially useful because on it, there are hundreds of different TV and film opening sequences. We used this to look at the opening sequences of ‘Seven’, ‘Dexter’ and ‘Hannibal’. These opening sequences gave us inspiration and ideas of the style that we wanted to follow.

PlanningPlanning was another key area that we had to look into before filming our opening sequence. Firstly we needed to decided what we were going to film. For this we gathered lots of ideas and formed a script and a shot list of what we needed to film.

Props and locations were other aspects that we needed to consider as well. For example, we decided not to use my camera because it does not record sound. Although we needed up recording the sound separate, in our initial ideas we wanted to record the speech and shots together.

ConstructionConstructing our opening sequence began with filming. To film, we used a variety of cameras such as hand held video cameras and DSLR’s. We did this to help create different effects for different scenes. Next we had to edit the different shots together to create the basis for our sequence. For this we used final cut pro. This editing software is professional and helped us to make our opening sequence look professional. The editing software can be a challenge to use at times but luckily one of the members of our group knows how to use it. Afterwards we had to add effects and transitions to our sequence to help the continuity and to create the dark and mysterious effect we were going for. On a lot of the shots we added a dark boarder to keep the claustrophobic theme and added a red tint to the shots of blood to make them look darker. We also kept our jump cuts simple with the effect ‘fade to colour’, this allowed us to create a chaotic title sequence but didn’t make it jump around too much and look too fast paced. We then finished off our sequence with music and sound effects. We chose the song ‘Ain’t gonna drown’ by Elle King because it sounded mysterious and the lyrics fit perfectly with the narrative of our film. We tired to sync the lyrics up with the shots on screen to help with the narrative. For sound effects, we used the ones provided on final cut pro and found an ambient piece, sounds of waves in the water and the sound of a camera flashing. We used these to help the audience to understand what was happening in certain parts of the sequence. These sounds also helped to set the location of the film, such as the water sounds in the scene with the swimming pool.

EvaluationWe uploaded our final opening sequence to YouTube which allowed for public feedback. We did receive one comment from some one that said “Good media piece”. This shows that our opening sequence has had a positive feedback.

We also gave a few people questionnaires which asked them for their feedback on our opening sequence. The overall feedback was positive but we did receive a few improvements, for example composing our own soundtrack.

EvaluationWe uploaded our final opening sequence to YouTube which allowed for public feedback. We did receive one comment from some one that said “Good media piece”. This shows that our opening sequence has had a positive feedback.

We also gave a few people questionnaires which asked them for their feedback on our opening sequence. The overall feedback was positive but we did receive a few improvements, for example composing our own soundtrack.