Film Opening - Title Sequence

We came up with the idea of combining the initial shots in our film of the general putting on his military uniform with the screens with the titles. By breaking up these shots with titles, we created a smoother looking transitions between the shots. We also added a unique touch to the title screens to keep things interesting and hold the veiwers attention, as in our opinion we believed that the title sequemces shouldn't be kept on the sidelines, but actually be an interesting part of our production. This was done using a typewriter effect of the text onto the background, accompanied by pictures of famous scenes and people from our era and location. The typewriter effect exagerrated the historic theme of the film opening.

 Here is an example of one of the opening title slides. The typewriter effect will be animated in.

Film Opening - Storyboarding and Animatics

This post links to the post about title sequences.
We went through a very large amount of ideas, producing many sketches and idea for storylines, some of which we put onto storyboards. The reasons for change was the problems we encountered during the production process, as locations and scenes would be impractical to film, so we had to think of shots that would achieve a similar effect without comprimising our intentions.When we felt we had come up with a good ideas that were feasible to film, we put the storyboard together and uploaded in an animatic-esque style.

Film Opening - Sound

In order to add atmosphere and realism to the film we considered adding enhanced sounds.

- Leather boot straps being tied.
- Sounds of crying
- Sound of the wind
- The sound of gunshots in the distance or shells falling. (this was the sound effect we ended up using)

We are also using two peices of music, with very diferent moods to them. The first is a relaxed song, played over the shots of the scenery. The song was called Les Feuilles.
The second was a song by the Russian Red Army choir, and has a much more serious military feel to it.
Both songs were found using YouTube, and were avaliable to sue for free.

Film Opening - Production company name and logo

We chose the name Red Star Productions. It sums up the genre of film opening we are producing, and is an exciting name that could become associated with producing both historic films, or those based on action and war, to produce titles similar to those found in our research:

• Hunt for Red October
• Saving Private Ryan
• Che

 We brainstormed for ideas for a logo. On paper, we made sketches of potential candidates, deciding we needed a logo that was bold, bright and represented the film we were producing. Eventually we combined two of our ideas coming up with the following logo.
Here is the logo produced to represent what our film company is about: It is simple yet very bold and straight to the point. The Red colour and hammer and sickle symbol were chosen as they provide a bold and recogniseable image when the logo appears in the opening titles of our film opening.

The logo was created using Adobe photoshop CS4 for the shapes, and Adobe flash CS4 for the filters and shading (flash was used as the filters can be changed in an animation, for example where the logo fades in the titles)

Film Opening - Ideas

Originally we thought of creating a zombie movie which focused on thoughts and feeelings of a lone protangonist. However we did not think this style of film would be easy enough to film and also contain all the information we needed in a 2 minute section. We started to watch some openings (usingYouTube) to get a better idea of what we were trying to achieve and also understand the limitations of an opening a bit more. We also used websites such as IMDB We had to keep in mind the type of equiptment we would be using will be basic and so this limited the type of shot we could produce, the type of costumes we could use which all would affect the whole stlye and structure of a film opening. 

We studied films such as:
- Enemy at the gates
- Che
- Saving private ryan
- Black hawk down   


We eventually came to the descison that we would create an opening for war film based around the Red Army. We thought this would be a good idea, due to the simplistic nature in which we could film the shots and also potray feelings and emotions even with lack of dialogue. The inspiration came from the fact that all of members in the group are also history students and all very interested in Russian history. However we still had to decide what period of russian history and what events to base the film on. We started to plan how we were going to shoot our opening, and also get an idea of what the opening should be about. We brainstormed many ideas, all to do with Russia however we began to relise the real limitations we faced while thinking of an idea. We decided to keep it as simple as possible because of the obvious limitations like setting, cast and props.