Reflective Analysis
Our film was a three-minute opening to a film called ‘Starting Over’.
Starting Over is an action thriller about a young man named Jack Walker who can’t
remember anything about himself every time he wakes up. He has a memory loss
problem which means going to sleep erases his memory, but he uses sticky notes
and a short video to remind himself of who he is every day. But someone is
taking advantage of Jack and uses him in order to kill people that the ‘Unknown’
number doesn’t like, by placing sticky notes with an address and a gun in his
house. Once he wakes up, Jack sees the order to kill whoever lives at that
address and mindlessly carries it out as he knows nothing about laws or who he
is. In our group of two, I was the editor and cinematographer.
The idea stemmed from two films in particular and I combined the ideas
behind both films in order to make something completely original that focus’ on
an issue of people with disabilities being taken advantage of. I took the idea
of memory loss from 50 First Dates as the main character goes through the exact
same thing, every time she wakes up she forgets everything. The idea of a man
killing whoever he is told to comes from Hitman: Agent 47, it’s not quite the
pure bred killer from the film but it is taking advantage of someone who doesn’t
know anything else to do their work for them. It raises the potential issue
that people get taken advantage of just because they don’t know any better and
people get these disabled or uneducated people to do things that are either
illegal or would get you in some sort of trouble.
Camerawork
The initial shot
of our opening was inspired by ‘The Wrestler’, ‘Gone in 60 Seconds’ and ‘Need for
Speed’ that use one long continuous take in order to show lots of pictures and
notes that give a back story to who the main character is and what their story
is so that the audience immediately knows a little bit about the character and
enough to understand the opening scene and follow the film from there. I slowly
moved the camera around the main character’s bedroom, going through all the
post-it notes that he had up so that the audience knows who the main character
is, then I showed a little bit of the character himself asleep, this means that
the audience will associate the information they just read to him. The shot continues
onto a gun with a note that says trust no one and then the camera moves up the
TV to the middle of it where there is a sticky note with the title of the film
on it, I saw this as an effective opportunity to add the title of the film into
the environment. The camerawork is very important in our film as a lot of the
shots are very observational and it gives a sense that someone is watching him
carry out this task to make sure he does it, it’s as if someone has hired him
and is watching him and that is what I wanted the camerawork to get across to
the audience. All the shots used either showed the audience what they needed to
see in order to understand the opening or they were observational to give the
sense that someone was watching, a couple shots were used to build up suspense
such as the shot of the main character in the rear view mirror. I used a time
lapse of the main character driving to the target’s house as this gives the
audience time to think about what has happened in the previous shots and piece
it together.
Editing
The editing
was probably the least important part of the opening, I added the black bars to
make the film widescreen and I added a colour grade that would match the sombre
tone of the film by adding a blue tone to the video itself and blue can be seen
as quite a sad colour. The titles at the very start were added so that it was
clear that it was an opening and the production company logo added to this
professionalism, it also makes the opening very conventional. The titles were
put in order so that the people grew in importance as the opening went on, I did
not take any influence from any other film for this as this plot was quite
unique and the style of filming for this genre was unique so it would be very
hard to find an influence. I cut the opening when I did, just after the gun
shot, so that then the film could go back to before this all began and show how
it got to this point, something that is done in a lot of films but especially
video games.
Sound
The music I chose for our opening
was a piano cover of The Pixies – Where is my mind? I chose this song as it is
about someone losing their mind and their world has changed, they don’t see
things in the same way as everyone else, this can apply to our opening as the
main character can’t see things in the same way as everyone else. His world is
completely different because every day is a brand new for him because he can’t remember
anything from his past, however, the piano cover has no lyrics it is just the
sombre notes of the piano that can be heard. I wanted to have quite a sombre
tone to the music as this makes the audience feel more for Jack’s situation,
the audience will immediately take to Jack and support him and that is what I wanted
from the opening. There are other sounds in the opening such as ambience for
outside shots and the gun shot at the very end. But the music was the crucial
part and played on its own for most of the trailer, there was some dialogue in
Jack’s video to himself and this was the only dialogue necessary to the plot,
the rest can be figured out on your own.
Word Count: 1041
