2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.