Friday 23 March 2012

Research and Planning

As my brief is primarily to make an opening for an action film, just for it to be based on a game, I know that the focus should be on the film aspect of that brief instead of the video game angle.
The elements which will be most influenced by the video game element of the brief would be the various aspects of  the mise-en-scene.

To begin generating ideas, and to see what action film openings usually comprise of I turned to Youtube, as it is an extremely useful research resource, as I discovered during the A2 coursework.










As my brief was for a mainstream action film, I decided to begin my search by looking at openings to a wide variety of action films. As "action" is a very broad genre and can encompass a wide range of different styles and settings, I found myself looking at many films which were somewhat different form one another, I was however able to establish trends and genre conventions which will be integral to the creation of my own Film opening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJubOZLpp4A

Unfortunately I wasn't able to embed this video, but the James Bond films are classic examples of action films.




I also looked at more stylised film openings, these offered less of a clear cut narrative but would also be clearer in terms of titles and setting up a narrative and tone for the rest of the film.














As my brief was to create a film which appears to be based on a real or fictional computer game, I thought it would be pertinent to also research into the specific genre characteristics associated with game to film adaptations.








Consolidation of preliminary research

One of the key defining conventions seen across all openings to mainstream action films, and also action films based on games, is that they they quite rightly begin with some kind of action sequence. unfortunately large scale action sequences are far beyond the limits of what I can achieve.

However from this research I also found that many action films begin with a chase scene, such as that seen in  the matrix and James bond openings in conventional action films, but also in the opening sequence to the Tekken film, an example of a real media text based on a video game.

Taking this into account my preliminary thoughts on my opening were that it should perhaps consist of some kind of chase sequence. However I wanted to look at openings to computer games as well and incorporate elements from the openings of those.

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