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Throughout the process of constructing my opening sequence, I have learnt a lot about different technologies. I used to internet to research our chosen genre of horror. For my research I read a few articles as a starting point, before thinking of my own ideas for my opening sequence. One of the articles I read was from http://ww.artofthetitle.com which was about the opening sequence of ‘Se7en’. Art of the title is a website that shows the creative process behind film and television title design. The article analysed the opening sequence and it also included comments from the director, ‘Kyle Copper’. Kyle Copper talked about how the horror films he watched as kid never showed the monster until the third act; this part of the article inspired me to show the antagonist of my film in the opening sequence. I also researched the film director, James Wan, using the website IMDB, which helped me find the accurate information on James Wan and the films he had directed. I used IMDB rather than Wikipedia as Wikipedia is an unreliable source.

We watch different movies online to help us decide on a category of film in which we would explore further. We watched movies such as Memento, Fight Club, Jaws, VHS and Sinister. We had both already decided on doing our opening sequence on horror, as its was a genre that we both found interesting and we also watch a lot of horror films, in our own personal time. Our opening sequence was heavily inspired by action movies but had the code and conventions of horror.

As part of research I watched and analysed some opening sequence: The Woman in Black, Sinister and Edward Scissorhands. I posted all of my analysed work on my WordPress blog, just like all my other work. My first analysed post of ‘Edward Scissorhand’ was very basic, in terms of the writing term knowledge and the way it was set out on my blog, I only posted the writing without a picture to support it or anything. My second analysed opening sequence post, was ‘Sinister’, was has more media studies related vocabulary. The post also includes the video of the opening sequence to support writing. My third analysed opening sequence post, is ‘The Woman in Black’; this post was a pop up video I had created. My different opening sequence analyses showed the development of the technologies I had learnt. The formats of my other posts were put in Prezi or slideshare, which made my blog look more interesting.

For my planning I used PowerPoint to show the images of the different locations I would be using for my opening sequence. I also used PowerPoint to show the costumes and props for the actors in my opening sequence. To create my story boards I used the website, pixton.com, to create a cartoon strip rather than drawing out the story board myself. For each scene on the cartoon strip, I explained what was happening. I also had basic tables for the risk assessment and schedule.

Before we sent out filming, we had done a lot of research about the different camera angles. We completed a task where we had to take photographs of different camera angles in a way that made the stills appear to be from a mystery film. As we didn’t the same equipment as the Hollywood films, we had to come up with creative ways to achieve different and interesting angles. To getting a tracking shot of the feet, we put the camera on a tripod and tipped upside-down and held the legs of the tripod. Then run along with the actress. During filming I used ‘shoot!’ and ‘cut’ and a simple clapperboard, to make it easier editing.

I used Sony Vegas to edit our opening sequence. As I had never used this software this before, I had to watch some YouTube tutorials. Once we had experimented different techniques, we began to construct our opening sequence. In our final cut of the opening sequence we added a video filter, to balance the colours as we filming on different days. The effect made the atmosphere look gloomy and comforted our genre of horror.

As the video camera we used wasn’t very good and the sound it had picked was muffled. We decided to mute everything we had filmed and add in sound effects. My partner was responsible for finding the sound effects, whilst I was editing. Sounds such as the ambient sound of the running tap water was added in afterwards, however the beginning part of our film, we kept the ambient sound of the birds chirping to making scene seem look more realistic. The score changed from ‘My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark’ by Fall Out Boy to the American Horror Story theme tune. The change of the score gave the opening sequence its fast pace. I layered the score over the sound effects, as by themselves they didn’t tie in the opening sequence together. The volume of the score was slightly louder than the volume of the sound effects. Before the scram, we had silence to add suspense.

We used YouTube to upload our interviews and our opening sequence. By using YouTube it enabled us to digitally share our work and receive feedback from a wider audience. Our videos did not get any comments, so we had to ask people from our school and the teachers for their honest feedback.