Representation In Films

What I have learnt
From analysing this opening sequence for its social representation I have found that the audience rely's on things such as mise en scene and location to help them identify the social representation, it has occurred to me that in my opening sequence I will have to think about how I want my social representation to be structured and how I will help portray that to the audience, I also think that I will make sure that my actors are around the same age groups as the people they are trying to represent so that it is easier for the audience to try and understand the social groups that I am going for and to help them pick up on key points in the narrative that may not stand out but instead are more subtle and hidden into the characters.

Narrative Structure

From this opening sequence I have learnt that it is important to try and include as many theories about narrative structure so that the audience can get a good understanding about what the film is going to be like, I also think that from this opening sequence I have learnt that in order to keep my audiences attention I should use a range of camera angles and instead of using typography on screen to describe something, I should instead try to use some sort of narrator so that the audience feel that they are being told the story and so that none of the audience miss out of key parts of information that they might not be able to read due to cuts from, editing or from transitioning camera angles.
Because I have never seen this film I would guess that the film is about these children who are put in detention banding together to go against the teacher in some sort of way, or that is what I can pick up from the opening sequence.





From this opening sequence i can see the importance of characters, I have learnt that my characters must be very clear so the audience can easily identify who should be doing what. I have also learnt that using binary opposites is very effective as a way of creating a villain, this is because binary opposites are very easy to spot in film openings which would help my audience discover the narrative that will happen later on in the film.  An example of this would be in Kick Ass because the audience can tell that there is going to be superhero's and villains later on in the film by the narration in the beginning. I have seen this film before so I know the narrative of the film, however saying this I think that they have done a very good job of giving hints into what might happen in the rest of the film

What I have learnt
Overall I have learnt the importance of all of these theories and how each of them effect the narrative in the opening sequence of a film. I will try and use all of these theories when I am planning my opening sequence so that I can cover all of the narrative topics and help the audience understand what will happen later on in the film.

Analysis Of Previous Students Work

I think that The Edge would get a B/A grade because some of the camera angles bring it down in my opinion because you can see the camera man and it might be brought down the grade because I think that there is no narrative in the opening sequence, but this could be improved by adding some sort of dialect to the opening sequence.

Learning Comment
From these openings I have found out the standard that I am expected to be able to produce an opening sequence to. These opening sequences also give me an idea of what Should be aiming for in terms of the types of shots they have used and their use of sound throughout the opening sequences. It will also help me to learn how to edit my film opening correctly in order to make the film as fluent as possible.

Title Research

Learning Comment
From the research of these films I have found out how to use typography to attract the audience and to suggest genres that may appear in the film. I also found what order I would need to put the typography in for my opening sequence, this study has also helped me think about how and where I should put the typography on the screen, in order to show the audience all of the important people that worked on the film.

Audience research

Primary and Secondary Audience Survey from jaimiesian

From the survey that we conducted on Survey Monkey, we found out what type of film people of our age group would like to watch in order to see what type of film we might want to make an opening sequence for, the survey took a wide range of people and asked them specific questions to get answers from them that would help us make our opening sequence.

From this in-depth research of opening sequences to coming of age films, we managed to find a wide range of techniques and tricks to make our film opening more exciting and make it more suitable to the coming of age film theme. There is also small bits of background information  on each of the films which helped us to think of important details that our film must have, for example an age rating for our audience.

In this video we got a teenage girl who doesn't do any sort of media study to describe what she likes about these film opening sequences, this was to get an unbiased view of what the film openings are like to people who don't necessarily know all of the techniques that are being shown, she also describes things that catch her attention which is good because these are all things that we could use in our coming of age opening sequence to make it more interesting to the audience.

Credit to Lucy Crow, Leanne Pratt and Jaimie Hampton for helping create the Prezi, Survey and Slide Share.



In this video you can hear the focus groups that we did with other people to find out what our target audience likes in films and how we could improve our films to suit the coming of age genre. They also answer questions about what films they like and the reasons why they like them.

Learning Comment

From doing these tasks I have learnt about different techniques that I could use to keep an audience engaged in tan opening sequence as well as learning about what types of films people find interesting and what previous coming of age films have done to make themselves stand out from the rest and to keep audience members interested in the opening of the film.