Media Stuides 2009-2011

Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction is a very strange opening to a film, it opens straight into two characters being shown in a two shot engaged in dialouge, it shows who you would first expect to be the main characters having breakfast in a diner, the whole scene revolves around the two characters conversation of talking about robbing banks and other places which leads you on to believing they may be the criminals of the film. As the scene continues you see camera shots which could be either a POV or over the shoulder shot its then a continuation of these and shot reverse shots. The action then begins briefly then you are directed away to the opening credits, which is joined by a fast tempo song to match the action which was just starting, the credits open with ‘miramax films present’ and then the directors name ‘Quentin Tarantino’ is introduced, after this the name of the film comes onto the screen in very large writing and then starts reducing in size whilst the actors names are written over the top, the title of the film remains visable throughout the whole sequence.

The Godfather

The Godfather opens with a fully black screen to start with and music playing in the background the music is mysterious which sets the tone for the film, the film title then shows up on the screen in white writing with the name of the producer above it. After this it opens with a close up of a characters face who is talking to somebody, however you cannot see who he is talking to at this point, as it continues the camera gradually moves backwards and another character appears but you are unable to make out any of his features as he is shown in the shadows. The dialogue continues and then the character in the shadows speaks out. As the first character shown moves around the desk at this point it becomes apparent there is more than 2 characters in this room, the camera then moves to another position to give a larger view of the room and you can see there is infact 4 characters in the room. All of this scene revolves around the two characters having a conversation and the film credits do not appear in this very opening part of the film.

This is my short piece of film for the Preliminary exercise, it was done to a brief, this was: A character must walk through a door, walk towards a desk then pass over an item and exchange a couple lines of dialogue, it was also supposed to be around 30 seconds long however we didnt reach this target as we found that gettin enough footage for the 30 seconds was harder than expected.

As already stated, the main problem which we encountered was reaching the designated time allowance, 30 seconds turned out to be alot longer than we expected, our film after editing was 19 seconds long which cut beneath the time allowed by a fair distance.

A strong point of the filming i personally thought was the shot selections, although they may not have been done perfectly they were a good selection of shots such as the close up of the chair and the over the shoulder and shot reverse shot sequence.

Another bad point was that we had to re-film all of one days work due to a large continuity error, this was the clothing, two actors within the sequence had both switched clothes which was a big mistake meaning that all our work was effectively ruined and had to be re-done.

One final good point was that the fade at the end was a success, although it was not part of the brief to add in effects, this served its purpose well and closed off the sequence nicely.