British Film Institute Southbank

Despite the strikes going on today we had a media trip to the bfi at Southbank and was accompanied by Ms Goulding. Pete the chief examiner showed us a presentation and told us how to film a good film opening and what to avoid doing. He started off by pointing out to us the five key features to make obvious in our film openings which included:

• Genre
• Narrative 
• Character 
• Atmosphere
• Setting 

 He then showed us a really useful site called http://www.artofthetitle.com/ he showed us the opening credits to Catch Me If You Can which was created by graphics and didn't include any people which I think was a really interesting thing to do because the film is not actually a cartoon. A few other openings we watched include Dawn of the Dead which had a lot of diegetic and non-diegetic sound as well as the opening credits to Napolean Dynamite which I really enjoyed as it fit into the whole concept of the setting in a school  because of the school lunches and the library books. We also watched the first ten minutes of Once upon a time in the West which had simple credits and appeared over a long period of time which would not be relevant to us as our film opening has to be up to two minutes. We were then told that our blogs which are part of research and planning are worth up to 20 marks so should be detailed and include lots of evidence from our film opening. We were then shown some examples of some good blogs and what we should be including in ours. We were also told to investigate more into the ideas we were looking at and build up our skills by going out and practise filming which my group regularly do. We were then told that we should be brainstorming ideas, creating 25 word pitches and listening to feedback from teachers and peers which we have already done and we were then told the seven most common film openings students tended to go along with which our group didn't fall under as ours is a spoof movie. After that we were told the most common problems that occur in film openings such as poor sound and lighting and then we marked other students film openings from previous years.

There were two speakers who came in to talk to us one was Dexter Fletcher an actor and recently a director and the other was a visual effects director called Simon Carr who has helped add effects to films like The Kings Speech and recently Easy Virtue.Simon showed us a clip of how the green screens are layered behind the actual scenes and said editing films can take up to 5 months. Dexter spoke to us about his upcoming film called Wild Bill which he described as a western film set in Newham in East London we then asked each of the speakers questions and I think this trip was extremely interesting and a useful day out I also think I learnt a lot from it and it will help in the editing of my groups film opening.

Here is a photo we took with Dexter Fletcher a director and actor who came to speak to us about our film openings.