This is the planning for our Opening Sequence. Answering these questions helped me understand exactly what I had to incorporate into the planning of the opening, and things we would have to consider when creating it.  

Initial Brainstorm Ideas

This is our brainstorm of our first ideas for our opening, as you can see we always had the idea of doing the genre of horror/thriller, but had to go through many ideas within this genre to get to our final idea. 

Feedback from Showcase

Feedback from Showcase Part 3

The final question on the feedback sheet, and probably the most important, in terms of ways in which we could improve our opening was
"Did you notice any serious issues such as continuity errors, strange edits - Did anything not make sense to you?"

• "Storyline was a tad confusing but knew roughly what was going on. Maybe sharpen some of the shots a bit."
• "Sound needs a bit of work. Didn't get the bit with the train."
• "Some bits are too dark, can't see as well."
• "Camera shots are slightly jumpy."

From this feedback we now know the things in our opening to go over. We will take these away and go through each one individually and discuss ways in which we can make these better for the audience.

Feedback from Showcase

Feedback from Showcase Part 2

The second question that was on the sheet that we gave out to our audience was

"Who do you think the target audience is?"

• "16+"
• "Mainstream"
• "People who like horror"
• "15+"

From these comments we can see we are doing well in terms of our target audience as two of the groups said similar age groups. And we wanted our film to be of the horror genre and this obviously came across well.

Feedback from Showcase

When we held the showcase where we showed our audience our Opening Sequence, we gave out sheets where we asked the audience to answer a few questions for us. I have taken a selection of the feedback sheets, so we can work as a group to improve our film and also get inspiration and confidence from the good comments.

The first question we asked was "What was especially good about the film?"

• "Really good editing- Red lipstick with black and white shot and good camera work and use of sound."
• "The camera work was really good. Good use of colour. Lighting was very good."
• "Never see the face till the end. Good shots of the knife. Shots of make-up and nail varnish at the start were really good."
• Lighting suits the genre. Good acting.

Research of Possible Film Genres

Horror 
"Horror films are unsettling movies that strive to elicit the emotions of fear, disgust and horror from viewers. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and thesupernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres. Horrors also frequently overlap with the thriller genre."
I got this information from Wikipedia.
The first sentence, is an extreme version of how we would like our opening to effect people. So we will be taking some ideas from the genre of horror. 
Thriller
"Thriller is a genre of literature, film, video gaming and television that uses suspense, tension, and excitement as the main elements.^[1] The primary subgenre is psychological thrillers." 
I also found this information on Wikipedia. 
Suspense, Tension and Excitement are all emotions we would like our audience to feel while watching our opening sequence. 
Drama Film
"A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, crime and corruption put the characters in conflict with themselves, others, society and even natural phenomena."


This final information is also from Wikipedia.


After reading up on information about Drama Film, I have realised that some of these elements would be 
vital in our opening to make it emotional for the audience. 


We would like to include a mixture of all of these genres in our opening to create the effect that we would 
like to achieve. 

A Summary of Problems our Group has Faced

As a group we worked, I thought reasonably well but there were certain times where we faced problems. The first problem we faced was the fact that me and Jess were the only ones who were close friends so the fact that we had to keep meeting up was quite awkward for us. Despite this, after working together for a few weeks in lessons we started to bond and we started to feel a bit more comfortable with each other so by the time we had started filming we were fine with going round each other's houses to have meetings and organise everything for filming.

The second problem we faced was with the editing. Me and Jess missed the lesson where everyone learnt how to use the editing software, so Efosa had to go through it with us again, which delayed us in terms of our schedule. For a couple of lessons we had to work a lot quicker than the other groups which was quite stressful for us, but once we had got over this we were able to work at the same pace as everyone else. 

Another problem we faced was the fact that on our opening sequence, the dialogue was between Jade and Efosa but after our teacher had watched it she advised us that Jade's accent took away from the genre of the opening and she thought it would be better if we re-recorded it and made it fit the genre better. We stayed after school and recorded my voice over the top of the footage, which I feel was a good decision and has improved our piece a lot.

Finally, we also could have organised our time better. If we had a list of what we would be doing in each lesson and we had to meet each task, we would have been much more up to date and we wouldn't have had to worry about who was doing what, and where they were doing it. It would have caused a lot less confusion and our work would have been done a lot quicker.