Question 1

Our film opening sequence follows the forms and conventions of real opening sequences, but it also challenges and develops some of these conventions. Fragmental is based on a girl who is living a life that she can’t handle and everything is hidden behind a smile, she doesn’t know what do with her struggles but we kept the opening sequence simple using some convections of the genres we decided to put in. We made our story line very different compared to Urban drama’s like Step Up, Freedom writers. What we wanted to do is make it less predictable that’s why we added in the part where she takes a knife with her which is certainly unexpected from a female.

Our opening sequence follows the same form of most openings by:

• Introducing the main character
• Introducing the narrative
• Having a visual reference to the film title.
• Setting the atmosphere/background
• Making the audience question on why she taking a Knife with her? Why is she crying? Why is it a female character?
• Introduced the narrative
• Added in the music

The themes in our film are based around: Depression, Violence, Fear, and Low self Esteem, Alone, School life, Childhood, Talented, Abuse, and Hatred.

School Life which plays a major part in Fragmental but we challenge this idea because she bunks most of her lessons so that’s a different kind of school life style

Girl discovers the boy dead in the toilet after hearing the gunshot.

We use forms and conventions of real movies and music clips looking at the music video (Kelly Rowland – Stole) the themes of bullying, ignorance, fear and violence is what we included in our sequence. The music video inspired me a lot and from there I brought it out to the whole of my group.

We didn’t expose her face but the characters body language revealed a lot. Violence drops right in when she pulls out the knife out of the drawer and puts it in her jumper pocket.

We don’t make it obvious that she going to go through all this because we didnt want to give away too much information. The way we make the form of the opening a sequence because it looks very typical and casual but we developed that casualness by making her room messy and the rest of the house look more luxurious so there you can see the contrast of it.

This way of revealing the way character is common in other teenage life dramas such as Kidulthood (2006) in were the main themes was violence and depression. The other major theme the audience may have noticed was sadness .This starts immediately when the camera directs close up to the actress face and she starts to cry. As we start to see her cry the tension of tragedy for her builds up more and more . This theme is continued throughout the film I was inspired by The Pursuit of Happiness (2006) for the theme of sadness and trying to be happy. This film has a lot of ways of showing sadness and the easiest way was to show the Father with tears.

And this is what brought use to have Deborah to cry to express on how she feeling at that moment of time.

Our film challenges the conventions of a typical teenage drama movie with regards to characterisation. The main character is a girl in the eyes of everyone that would seem a bit different because it would usually a boy that would be going through problems like this and handling it in this particular way so we developed and challenged the form and convention to have it all played by a girl and having her put the knife in her pocket. Her wearing a hoody symbolises some kind of hidden girl and that’s she up to something this is the image society has created about teenagers in hoodies.

 In the film (1DAY ) they portray the image of wearing hoodies a lot and there is a scene of them being in a snackbar and old people get scared of them because they have the criminal look. So on her pulling out the knife and putting it in her hoodies pocket it makes the visuals generate questions and this creates enigma as the audience are intrigued as to what will happen next.   We also challenge the forms and conventions by making the character look very rowdy and street wise in the place of wearing the good, frizzy hair, the knife and the JD side bag it’s all kind of props that isn’t usually in teenage dramas for girls.

The soundtrack is depressing, hip-hop and tragic and resembles the waking up, dressing up and brushing teeth just a casual morning. This tone of music is conventional of the drama genre and is used to keep the audience on edge and build up the suspense. In our opening sequence, it leads up to when the main character opens the drawer and the audience see a knife. It was hard to decide at first on what soundtrack to use. We thought whether we should follow the conventions or challenge them but we chose to challenge them and make it a slow pain with a RnB/Hip Hop beat to it and that isn’t what we mostly expect from scenes like this.

For all the things we see the lighting in our location was pretty much good because everything was clear in the room and it did take some time to get it looking like that.

As our opening sequence follows a classic narrative pattern and is a linear sequence, similar to other real film openings, we tried to create a seamless effect with continuity. Various narrative techniques were used in order to achieve this as effectively as possible such as transitions of fades and dissolve during the pan around her room and her getting dressed up. We did all of these in different angle shots and distances so that we could edit this together and communicate the idea of disorientation and make it quite jumpy for the viewer.