Monday 30 September 2013

Blogging on sound in film openings

KEY TERMINOLOGY: NON-/DIEGETIC; AUDIO BRIDGE; ANCHORAGE; EXPOSITION; AMBIENT

Before planning and producing your own film opening, you should seek to research - and evidence this investigation - every aspect of film openings: narrative structure, idents, titles (credits and exposition), representations, audience targeting, genre signifying, mise-en-scene and verisimilitude, cinematography, editing, influence of budget, sound etc
Many of these elements could be investigated/discussed at the same time
The key to this is viewing a range of examples, taking notes and screenshots, and then presenting your findings in the form of well-illustrated blog posts and/or brief vodcasts. Screenshots (and occasionally short video sequences recorded using tools such as VLC - too long and it'll get banned from YT) are absolutely key, and should be saved too in named folders for re-use with your Evaluation and later posts explaining where your ideas come from.

This video assembles the titles of the Scream movies, which show that music isn't always the best means of signifying genre or setting a mood; a montage of sounds can work at least as well if mixed skilfully.

Titles + Idents in Films vodcast task

This 2012 production took inspiration from Scream for its titles...
For this task each of you will examine two films. You then need to compare your findings with at least 1 other classmate, tho you can do so with as many as you like so long as all your examples end up in the vodcast. I want each of you to look at different examples: 1st come 1st served - I'll list the films selected at the bottom of this post.

I'd like each of you to create a simple vodcast on Titles + Idents in Film Openings.

Very simply, detail the idents that appear in each of the films (when listing the films, provide director, year, budget + box office summary) and then the titles that appear at the start of film as part of the film opening (which may mean at the conclusion of the opening - titles often appear once the sequence is concluded and, common with slashers, we start to pick up a second character travelling to the scene of the killing we've just seen).

Sunday 29 September 2013

IDENTS Creating yours!

KEY FEATURES OF AN IDENT:
  1. COMPANY NAME
  2. JINGLE/SOUND
  3. GRAPHIC/VIDEO
  4. ANIMATION


Following these 2 vodcasts you will find a further breakdown of what an ident is, its appearance (or media language) and examples from the industry and past students. You should also look at the post for the titles/idents vodcast task.
CREATING AN IDENT USING LIVETYPE: JC VODCAST

FILM OPENINGS VODCAST1: IDENTS (DB)


One of the features the exam board (and general viewers via YT + events such as the Creative Arts Evening) most highly praise about AS work is the company idents featured at the start of them.
One of last year's wackier idents!
Each of you will be creating a company ident, so you'll need to blog (evidence Research + Planning) on the following (the individual post titles are in red):

LINKS LIST Task

Log in to blogger
Go to LAYOUT and click ADD A GADGET on the right side; find + select LINKS LIST
Give it the title ‘Useful Slasher Genre Resources’
Separately open http://dbhorror.blogspot.com/
Using my links lists/posts, add at least 5 links to your list, making sure you don’t use the link for the link description
Save, then reposition so that your blog archive remains the top gadget
If there’s time left, add another gadget, an RSS feed: for Horror articles on The Guardian (+ again reposition)
If you hadn’t already, email me the updated progress doc if you’ve made changes