Example of Storyboarding for opening of Darkest Child

The Shining Opening Analysis

I am going to analyse the opening three minutes of Stephen King's the shinning, one of the most simplistic horrifying opening to one of the most infamous horror film. Dream of the Witches' Sabbath" by Berlioz starts from the very beginning as the camera is seemingly air born as it is drawn towards an island, the island gets closer and the camera angles to a diagonal before giving an aerial shot of a car driving through a road surrounded by tall tries like little arrows with dramatic shadowing. Watching the opening especially with the disturbing but beautiful music gives you the feeling of some sort of ghostly presence, the camera angle for me made me feel like a bird soaring above and following this cars journey. The car carries on with its journey with beautiful shots fading in and out that without the music could easily be mistaken for a nature documentary. The titles fade up and off the screen relatively quickly in simple blue font; THE SHINNING doesn’t appear on the screen for any longer than the others and in this respect seems more like the ending titles than the opening. Two minutes in the car disappears under a rocky tunnel and the viewer is feeling uneasy and then it’s there in the distance the viewer’s following it along its journey. Almost hypnotic the opening immediately draws the viewer in to a feeling of great unease. Finally at 2; 50 the car seem to be arriving to its destination, little house appear in the snowy mountains, the first human habitation seen so far.

Treatment Questions

Thriller as Media Studies ResearchSheet

Treatment

Final Treatment Narrative

Moodboard

I tipexed silhouettes of characters from our narrative onto scenes i could imagine being in our film,
i also found images of actress/actors that i thought would be perfect for the roles in our film.
It has not yet been decided by i envisage the protagonists as being a young girl and boy, a pre-pubesant love story, a somewhat sinister Moonrise Kingdom.

Potential Treatment

Possible Treatment Thriller

AS Foundation Portfolio - Preliminary Task - 'The Receptionist'

Making of Preliminary Film Task

Making of Preliminary Task

Research on Idents and Logos

I did some research on Idents and Logos and found some examples that i found particularly inspiring; This is a selection of E4 idents over the years. this is a selection of the beloved Disney idents.

Juno Reconstruction

Post Production Juno

After filing remaking of the Juno opening, we had to edit the shots as well as inserting titles and transitions using Final Cut Pro. We tried to make ours replicate the original as well as possible one of the ways we did this was by marking down the timings and correlation between the shots and the titles appearance. The titles in the Juno opening are hand drawn, luckily however we found a font that closely resembled them and we adjusted colour, outline and size.

Juno Opening Sequence

Preparation of the storyboarding and deconstruction of Juno

In our class we were asked to deconstruct and reconstruct the opening of Juno.. The first thing we had to do was deconstruct the opening by watching the video along with its opening song 'All I want is you' by Barry Louis Polisar, noting down every shot and then replicating it with story-boards. Being my first experience with story-boarding, I assumed it would be relatively simple but it ended up being quite time consuming as we had to draw every single frame and ended up with pages of story boards.

Through the storyboards we were able to piece together the details like the props, Juno's wardrobe, edits, transitions and timings of each frame. We brought in orange juice for Molly, aka Juno, to drink who also brought in clothes to match those of Juno's in the opening. However there were some continuity issues with the dress code as we filmed over several days-there was a slight variation in jeans and a mix up with the shoes.  Molly brought in leaves she made herself to replicate the leaves in Juno which allowed her to have some creative input into the making of the film. I had never filmed before and I found it difficult to get used to using the camera and especially the tripod. We had to work out the timings of each frame and the edits and camera work between frames. Having to mimic the panning and zooms was a good example of the attention to detail we had to pay.

Se7en opening analysis

Se7en Opening Analysis

Definition of 'Thriller'

I thought it be helpful to define what the thriller genre is as it's not as clear cliched as other film types. I also wanted to distinguish the the thin line between the horror and thriller genre. The thriller genre, although showing similar traits to Horror is far more subtle focusing on stimulating the viewer's moods inducing high levels of anticipation, anxiety, uncertainty and in some cases terror without revealing clearly what it is to be frightened of- unlike horrors where there is clear gore and the enemy tends to be unmasked. Psychological thriller is a specific sub genre of the broad ranged thriller that's becoming increasingly popular, it's focus is on the unstable emotional states of characters an example is one of my favorite films, Silence of the Lambs.

Welcome to my blog!

Hello I'm Katie and this is my blog,
I am a media student working towards making the opening two minutes for a thriller movie. You can watch my progress as I write analysis of openings, research and story-boarding for my final piece over the coming months. Thanks for listening, stay tuned- Katie