Collaboration

Collaboration 

Throughout the course of planning the opening scene for our media studies coursework, we decided to engage in a group session where we discussed the initial thoughts and ideas for what we wanted to include in the opening scene. 

 We began by jotting down on a piece of A3 paper what ideas and events if any were to be included within the opening sequence. We shortly after came to the conclusion that we were going to produce an opening scene in the Action genre and this was due to the fact that it was a genre that both me and Cameron are greatly accustomed to. Also we felt that due to our all ready pre-existing knowledge on the Action genre, we felt that we would be able to create and effective, interesting and professional opening scene. We fired ideas out at each other to figure out if any appealed or sounded useful but none of the ideas were either practical or realistic. 

After this we decided to slow the process down by looking at examples of pre-existing Action movies and decided as a collective what we both thought was effective and useful with a chance of us being able to replicate it or weather or not it wasn't possible to recreate. We looked at examples such as 'Fury, the Hunger Games, James Bond and also A-Team'. These were of great assistance as we have now decided what sub- genre of Action we are going to do and also what would needed to be included in order to make the opening scene a successful one. The setting was a rather large issue within the discussion as we both felt that our own ideas would be much more suited to the opening scene instead of listening to the other persons opinion. Once we had heard each other out we fell to the conclusion that we would have to settle somewhere in the middle of our opinions and collectively decide rather than one person dictating.

We further developed the discussion by talking about sounds, in particular diegetic and non-diegetic sounds. We talked about a character receiving a phone from the antagonist whilst an eary sound effect would play over in the background to provide suspense and mystery. The correct use of sounds weather dialogue or soundtrack is vital to the film as it creates mood and atmosphere. This is especially important to the opening sequence due to the fact that the opening sequence sets the mood and atmosphere for the rest of the film and persuades the audience to continue on watching the rest of the film. Without this session and the information we gathered from it, the opening scene would be very hard to produce due to the fact that we would have to decide at the last minute on the spot weather or not we wanted to include something.