A Bittersweet Life

I set apart an afternoon for this homework. I was quite excited to do it. This is how it all went down:

1. Pop DVD into my computer, finger ready at the PrtScn key
2. Begin watching film Put subtitles on, try again
3. Watch opening scene
4. End up watching the whole film
5. Film ends
6. Go back to opening scene and begin copying each shot of the sequence
7. Check online for software with which to make this arduous and testing task easier
8. Have no luck in doing so
9. Pause, Alt+PrtScn, Paint, Ctrl+V, Select, Highlight, Ctrl+X, New, Ctrl+V, Save, Play...
10. Repeat step nine 61 times.
11. Midnight

Needless to say, I underestimated quite how frustratingly 'crashy' computers can be under pressure. Will annotate each of these tomorrow. For now I'd just like to get them all uploaded and have a nice relaxing aneurysm in peace.
_____________________________________________________________________

 1. Here we go! After several other names are presented to us in this font and format, our voiceover begins and we see the writer/director/brainchild/dreamweaver fade into a shot of trees brushing from side to side in the wind...

2. These trees continue to sway as we slowly move from an almost black & white into vibrant colour and slightly windier weather

3. Over this, we are told of an ancient proverb. A disciple asks his master whether it is the wind or the leaves that flow. The master tells him it is neither, but instead the heart and the mind.

 4. From here, we cut to footprints against a marble floor.

Cinematographer Kim Ji-yong uses this film to seemingly develop a trademark visual style, marked by a clean and immaculate set with a flourish of red to seperate it from simply looking intentionally bland.

The camera tilts up the mans body while following him walk, yet we only for a split second see the side of his face.

5. With this shot we are introduced to our protangonist, Kim Sun-woo.

The camera moves towards Sun-woo and mimics the movement of the man walking towards him, who soon comes into shot behind him and goes right up to the table



6. The camera moves out from behind a blind to show us the two men conversing, as though we are viewing a private conversation. If I had remembered to put the subtitles on, I wouldn't have to explain what they were talking about.

 

The consierge asks for the dining man's assistance in disposing some unwelcome guests who are refusing to leave. We instantly get an indication of the man's style: he cooly and non-chalantly says he'll be right there and the man leaves him to finish his food.

7. mmmmmm.

8. We see Sun-woo take one bite out of his pudding and then quietly leave his table and set off to dispose of the trouble like a total badass.

9. The camera pans around the bar area while our character approaches. This shot best illustrates director Kim Joo Woon's style, with long shots at a steady pace, as though we are moving alongside Sun-woo.

As he walks along the white strip on the floor, he indicates a dirty area to a nearby cleaner, who immediately stops what she is doing in order to clean that spot instead. Something as little as this tells us enough about Sun-woo, and also confirms him as a man of authority.

Coupling this with his attire and suave yet pressing walk, we already know that whatever it is this man has been tasked to deal with, it is almost certain he will be able to do so without losing his cool.

10. The next shot detailing Sun-woo's movement through the hotel begins walking down a corridor before he appears at the other end walking towards us. This shot makes it appear as though we are passing him by on his travels.

11. Next we see him pass by another person and see the other man watch Sun-woo as he barely bats an eyelid back.

12. In the next shot of his travels, Sun-woo walks past an open door and seeing some movement, pauses for a moment to check out whether there is anything suspicious he should be aware of. This again hints at his role in the hotel and certainly the film.

It is also interesting to note that when the man in the shot before is watching him he pays him little interest, but here where the man in the distance cannot see him, he takes a moment to pause. This preference to stay voyeuristic is important as it makes him a much more expected spy later in the film.

14. As Sun-woo makes his trek, there is a significant decline in clenliness at the hotel. Compare the set of marble tiles with a red focus where we began with the brick walls and dank looking hall we see him walk through now.

15. This sequence has been edited together so that we cut directly from Sun-woo opening a door into him already walking in the new room. This is known as ellipsis, and gives his walk a gritty, unreal quality.

 In a continuation of the same shot, Sun-woo continues until he is stood in the door of a room of several relaxed men watching TV. He does not say or do anything until one of the men notices him.

When one does spot Sun-woo is watching them, he immediately springs to his seat and begins to get dressed, alerting the others to do the same. A fourth man also sits up and sheepishly looks over at Sun-woo who beckons him to get up. During all this, he stands there without saying a word.

 

The opening scene continues a futher two minutes and features a fantastic fight scene which completely contrasts the long shots it begins with, almost doubling the amount of shots in the same timeframe. That this flowing sequence is done with only a handful of tracking shots, yet lasts just over 2 minutes shows us how a lot of information about a character and setting can be displayed to an audience without the need for dialogue. 

Which is pretty comforting considering what we have planned for our opening sequence. Hooray!

Shot-by-shot

Immediately after finishing this list I flicked back through and figured that it was totally impossible to have such a length opening sequence with under 20 shots. With that in mind, it does provide a rough overview of our project and some of the weird and wonderful ideas we hope to make work. Also, it took quite a long time and features some interesting illustrations. With ideas now becoming set in stone, we are beginning to think about starting to gather props, ask people favours and write up a minimalist script for our characters. It's all getting quite exciting.

Target Audience

One of our shared pet-peeves - and something we hope to avoid making - is a film which is only ever so slightly different from most other films in it's genre. This is arguably most apparent in 'Chick Flick' films, of which several follow a basic formula, varied just enough to appeal to it's target audience (just try and spot the difference between films like Freaky Friday, It's a Boy Girl Thing and The Hot Chick.)* However, thriller films are just as guilty of this. A good example would be the perplexingly obvious similarities between Secret Window and Hide and Seek. This diagram exactly demonstrates what we didn't wanted our film to become.
With all this information in mind, we decided to aim our thriller specially at film enthusiasts: people who may spot the occasional reference to other works and hopefully appreciate and recognise the same influences we pay homage to. We envisioned this target audience as being around our age (mid-teens to early-twenties), with a notable interest in film and television and people who would equally spot the same clichés we drew up a list of, most likely to their chagrin. 

*To cover my ass, I also love some Chick Flicks. Waitress, Say Anything... c'mon, who doesn't love Mean Girls?

Codes and Conventions

Before we even started work on our actual treatment, we decided to write a definitive list of thriller film clichés. These stereotypes were ones we instantly acknowledged from many films in the genre and as such the list soon spiralled into a "don't do any of this" list instead:

• Aliens/monsters/vampires or anything similarly supernatural
• Photographs or newspaper clippings on a wall
• Split personality disorder
• Fires, explosions, thunder & lightening (ok, maybe we would have if we could...)
• Mist, fog or blurred vision
• Cars breaking down or characters getting lost
• Masked or cloaked figured
• Hysterical crying or screaming
• "Scare chords"
• Ridiculous plot twists that make the whole film completely pointless or illogical.

Possibly the most pessimistic summary of a genre ever committed to blog, we later backtracked on some of these, realising that abandoning every cliché we could think of would leave us very little to work with, and would make our filming/plot much more difficult to do.

Although, we decided that whatever on the list we did end up using, we would try our best to approach in a new way, by either subverting or intentionally highlighting a particular aspect of its traditional usage.
For example, at the burial of his pet dog, our main character does cry, but it is instead a gradual build up from a whimper to a silent moan, which seems much more effective than the chronically overused "blast of noooo". This idea was something I now remember seeing in the pilot episode of Six Feet Under, and after a lot of searching I managed to find a clip of this scene (6 minutes into the video):



Although becoming a hysterical cry, I found that with the silence before this became much more powerful. This list also lead us to our next important question: who is our product aimed at?

Mise-en-scène

As the thought slowly dawned upon us that we actually have to take steps in order to ensure our film makes it out of development hell and onto the big silver media-studies screen, we began to focus on exactly what we would need in order for our film to become a real product.

The first thing that we thought could be a real problem for us was our location. Although when writing the original treatment I envisioned using my Aunt's garden as a potential filming point, I had no real guarantee that this would be possible. Realising that we would most likely have to film on weekends due to our massively important and busy social lives ("why would you lie on the blog?") this also meant that we would not be able to film in and around an empty house as we hoped for.

Next up was cost, which wasn't really a major issue as neither of us minded paying a few quid to buy props and costumes and other buzzwords we can embolden for emphasis.

Most of the props and costumes we required were simple things we had lying around our houses (e.g. shoe boxes, notepads, skateboards...) but one particular thing we had completely overlooked was compost, which we would need for the make-shift grave. This also made me worry about my Aunt's reaction should we tip a large bag of compost all over her lovely garden in the name of media.


With our initial idea as well, we were quite adamant that we wanted a clear day during our first scene, and a windy wet night for our next. One spectacular realisation later, we concluded that we absolutely could not depend upon the weather being reliable for our filming schedule, and decided to come up with two very slightly different ideas (one for wet and one for dry) for each scene. This way, it will not matter as much if the filming doesn't match our original intentions
There was a general assumption between the two of us that as far as acting goes we were much better off asking friends and family to be in our film, if not only to save ourselves from mutually assured corpsing the second a camera was pointed at us. However - in all honesty - I can't say I know anybody who owes me a big enough favour to agree to act in our film, so it is likely that we will end up taking on roles ourselves. As the quality of the acting is probably our biggest roadblock, we attempt to side-step this by taking the emphasis off acting and thinking more about our actual shots and the mood of our scenes, similar to more slow-paced works, for example, There Will Be Blood and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Which is certainly not to say that I won't deliver the Oscar nominated performance of the century...

Inspirations (read: excuses to post great film openings)

Having quite similar taste, the pair of us made a list of films with opening sequences that we particularly enjoyed or that stayed in our minds for whatever reason, but this notepad was pretty much an exercise in long-winditudinalality and so I took it upon myself to post my own personal High Fidelity-esque Top 5 Opening Sequences:

5:

- Touch of Evil (1958)

One of the most revered and innovative tracking shots ever, Orson Welles' crime thriller has stood the test of time and over 50 years on this opening sequence still wows its viewers (well, me). It's just cool as.

4:


Another critically acclaimed opening sequence, here Fellini shows us how silence can be utilised to contrast and accentuate the sounds of a man having a panic attack. This opening particularly influenced my ideas of the second scene of our opening, in the way silence can make a viewer feel uncomfortable rather than stumbled, keeping them on the edge instead of using scare chords to knock them off it.

3: 
http://youtu.be/WokcHt5UQ-M
- A History of Violence (2005)
seriously youtube, have I wronged you in some way?

Again, a BIG(!) influence on my ideas, Cronenberg manages to keep your attention during this sequence despite extremely little being said/described or happening. This guy has been making crazy weird films almost 40 years now. I think there is some kind of bizarre correlation between being a successful director and having David as your first name. Will research.

2: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHn1zogeyO4
- Lord of War (2005)
boo you youtube let me embed this waghhhh

Was this the greatest film ever? Not by a long shot (lol). But it is quite possibly Nick Cage's finest performance in recent years and this opening alone makes it well worth watching.

1:

- Magnolia (1999)
 I just think this is the bee's knees.

Honorable mention goes to Stranger than Fiction, A Serious Man, Amelie, Begotten (ewwww) and particularly Enter the Void for being really quite insane.

Initial thoughts/ideas

Being set the task to film an opening "thriller" sequence and document the process, it took several false starts before the pair of us began to connect on ideas, eventually devising a short plot with which to base our ideas on, which we have included below:

   "Following opening credits, the camera shows us an opening overhead shot of a family stood around a shallow grave. It is only a small grave in their back garden which is meant for the family pet, Randal. We see a close up of a man holding a box containing the dead pet: he is the oldest character in the scene and is giving a speech about the passing of their pet being unexpected and too soon. We see directly opposite this character the other three characters in the scene, a mother, brother and sister. The brother has distinctly red eyes and seems the most shaken up about the death. Everybody except him is dressed in casual clothes, but he looks decidedly more professional, as though he had lost a dear friend and is greatly affected by the loss. We follow his eyes focus on the box and he begins to whimper (like a dog). His sister - noticing this - brushes her hand against his and this makes him break down and cry. From over the dad's shoulder, we switch focus from him watching his son cry to movement in the window of the house behind. The dad does not react to this as though he has not noticed. We switch to a POV shot from the figure inside the house staring out at the family, who begin the burial of Randal. The shot tilts down and we see - through this person's POV - a girl's notepad on a messy desk. We see the name 'Lacey' on top of the pad and see half a page has been torn out.
   In our second opening scene, we open with flashes of the box intersected with a 'Raimi cam' shot of something quickly moving along the garden in the dark, highlighting the feral, animal style movement of the person. We see this is from the boy's point of view, who - using his bare hands - digs up the box. As he lifts it up, the camera goes around the side of the box and into the hole on the side and we see from this perspective the inside of the box when the boy opens it. The boy immediate reaches into the dog's mouth and pulls out a small plastic bag (which he obviously knew was there, but is still distressed by). Opening the bag and unfolding a small note written on the half-page missing from the notepad, we see it reads: 'I still love you.'"

Although we tossed and turned over particular aspects - before we even began to consider the actual logistics in what was (and would soon turn out not to be) possible - we used this as our basic idea and began to naively celebrate our newfound success as visionary screenwriters.

The self-dubbed 'Raimi cam' shot described in our treatment was based on a long tracking shot found in 'Raising Arizona' where the camera itself acts like a monster dashing up a ladder into a bedroom where a mother has just found her baby is missing. After doing some research into this, we found that Joel and Ethan Coen had 'borrowed' this technique from a film-directing friend of theirs named Sam Raimi, who famously used this technique in a chase scene from Evil Dead 2, and it's one of the most ridiculous looking things ever:

- Breaking doors, cracking bones, inventing comror (comedy-horror).

(or hilariorror if you prefer.)

We both struggled to come up with an idea we considered to be typical of the thriller genre while simultaneously not including so many of the codes and conventions that it became derivative of other works. Having said that we did take inspiration from some well known and influential opening sequences...