After looking at various film openings and learning how to analyse them, we were asked to choose our own film, and analyse the opening. I thought that The Devil Wears Prada had a very effective film opening and was interesting to analyse.
I first watched a few minutes of the film and decided where I thought the opening scene finished. I then started to take screen shots of the film which I thought were significant to the opening, focusing on the mise en scene and sound used. These are my results...
The lovely bones is orriginally a novel written by Alice Sebold, in 2009 it was generated into a thriller/fantasy/drama film. The storyline centres around a fourteen year old girl named Susie Salmon who is persuaded to look in an underground den which her seemingly harmless neighbour, George Harvey, has previously made. George Harvey murders Susie whilst in the Den, Susie is then pulled into a surreal world that is neither Heaven norEarth, but "The In-Between".
She continues to watch over her loved ones, unable to let go of her life and family despite her new afterlife friend, Holly Golightly, urging her to move on. Susie's father begins to piece together the dissapearence and eventually becomes confident that George Harvey is the killer. However, George manages to escape before he can be accused. Overtime, the Salmon family manage to heal and Susie watches them progress. She eventually is greeted by George Harvey's other victims and her afterlife begins in heaven.
The Lovely Bones estimated budget was $65, 000, 000, The production companies Film4, DreamWorks, WingNut films and Key Creatives all helped to finance the film.
Which Production Company(s) provided the finance? What other films have the company(s) produced?
In April 2007, with the script completed by Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens, and Jackson intending to direct, the group of producers began seeking a studio partner to finance the film adaptation. Jackson sought a beginning $65 million budget for The Lovely Bones, also requesting from studios what kind of promotional commitments and suggestions they would make for the film adaptation. The Lovely Bones was sold to DreamWorks for $70 million andParamount Pictures received the rights to distribute the film worldwide.
Distribution
The films premiers took place in the US, UK and New Zealand.
The film was first shown in cinemas in America in February 2010. It was also shown in 46 different countries at cinemas around the world. The film was also shown at a film festival in the Us (Santa babara).
The film was distributed by United International Pictures in Argentina and Singapore; Universal Pictures International in Belgium and Netherlands; Zon Lusomundo Audiovisuais in Portugal and Finnkino in Finland. But was most commonly distributed by Paramount Pictures – the parent company of DreamWorks.
Exhibition
What was your film’s box office takings? Would you expect it to be shown in Empire at tower park? Why?
On it’s opening weekend the film made £1,637,579 in the UK (shown on 420 screens) and $116, 616 in the USA (shown on 3 screens). The gross taking for the film was $43, 818, 839.
I would expect to see The lovely Bones shown at The Empire at Tower Park as it is such a successful film, and this is a large popular cinema!
What formats is your film available on for home exhibition?
The Lovely Bones is available on DVD, Blue ray DVD, VCR. The DVD is available on both Region 1 and Region 2 platforms. Various different languages and subtitles are available.
Horizontal & Vertical integration
The film is horizontally intergated because it has a parent company, Film4. However, the film is also vertically intergrated because another one of it's producers Dreamworks is linked to the distributor Paramount Pictures.
Once we had finished filming our clip, we captured all of our footage on the computer. We used Adobe Premier Pro to edit our filming, but as we were an unusually large group we could not all edit at once.
There were many difficulties whilst editing, particularly the match on action sequence where Alex B goes to open the door, and we see him walking out the other side. It was very stressful as each time we inserted a new clip, the software would play up and delete another. This was very frustrating and time consuming. Eventually we had to re-edit and organise the sequence of the clips. And some of the clips had to become shorter than we had hoped.
This was my first time using premier pro, and at times I found it fairly confusing, however the more I played around with it the more simpler it became. I feel that because the clips became so awkward whilst I was editing, I took over trying to fix what had gone wrong.
I feel that the finishing product is much shorter than planned, but considering my groups situation I think it turned out reasonably well! I believe It would have been more successful if there had been sound effects throughout, but unfortunately we did not have time for this.
Considering we had no choice but to film within school grounds, a lot of our shots had to be filmed in corridors, and even though we filmed during lesson time, there was a lot of disturbance as people needed to access these areas. However, we continued to film hoping that this would not affect our end result too much.
The camera was placed on a tripod throughout the filming, this helped us to avoid unnecessary camera shake, and also achieve 'over the shoulder' shots quite successfully.
After searching the school, we eventually came across an empty classroom which we could use to film our conversation. However there were a few inconveniences, as other pupils left lessons and walked by the window which was in shot. This meant we had to wait for the pupils to get to their next lessons so it was more quite and not visible on camera.
considering we had less than 2 hours to film, I think we did a really well. We worked as a team and despite the differences and inconveniences we worked together and completed this part of the task.
Alex walks to locker, opens it, then receiving a text message, he takes the phone out of his pocket, read the message and puts it back into his pocket. He then walks through a door and down a corridor to meet Alice.
Arrives at door, looks through then opens it and walks into the room, where Alice is waiting.
Alex: …you wanted to talk?
Alice: Well…It’s just that
Alex: Well…
Alice: Shall we see 'Back to the Future' or 'Buried' tonight?
We had begun to film a few shots from our original storyline, we all had roles within the group. Both Dan and Alex B were acting, and Alex G, Alice, Olivia and I controlled the equipment. However the next time we came to film, our main character was away. This put our task at a halt, as we needed two males to perform the characters and there was only one present in our group.
As we were running out of time, we had no choice but to change our storyline, and adjust it to our situation. The new storyline was a lot more basic, and less fun. But we worked as a team to achieve the task.
We all put together a knew simple script and storyboard. However a lot of the dialogue was improvised during filming. The main characters remained with Alex B continuing with a similar role, and Alice stepping in as our new role!
For our preliminary excersise we were asked to film and edit a short clip which should include the following shot types and techniques:
shot/reverse shot
180˚rule
match on action
Within a group of six, we had to come up with a story line for our clip involving a character/s walking to meet another character/s and sitting down to have a conversation, we put together all of our ideas and created a script and story board.
We eventually put together a storyline, where a character receives a text from who he believes to be his 'lady-friend', asking him to meet her for the first time. He is excited by this, and rushes to find her. He is pointed in the right direction by fellow students and after a few various shots reaches the door of a classroom and looks through the glass window. The second character who he has come to meet is looking out the window, therefore has her back to him. As he enters the room 'she' begins to turn around, however the camera cuts to a close up of the first characters reaction before we get to see her. They exchange a few lines, with the camera still concentrating on the first character. The second character introduces herself as 'Sammy' the 'female' he has been texting. The first character then runs out of the room, and we next see a pan shot from Sammy's feet to her face, revealing that she is in fact a male! The last two shots shows Sammy drop a rose he was holding, and then a match on action shot shows the rose falling to the floor.
Alice Clarke was given the task of drawing the images on the storyboard, as she has done a lot of art in the past. We all discussed the order of the storyboards.
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