Film Opening Inspiration and Ideas

At first, as a group, we looked all the different film genres that we could do and we came to a point where we had decided that we wanted to do either a romantic film, teen drama film or a comedy film. These were the 3 genres that we would base our film opening on and from this we explored the ideas in which we could go about these.

The first genre we looked at was romance the ideas we got for a romantic film were:-
- 2 Main characters; male and female
-Typical romantic film - falling in love with one another
- Possibly obsticles as to why they can't be together
- Characters that might not have wanted the main 2 characters to be together
- Possibly a hint of jealously as a twist

- Could encounter social class problems

- Could be a love hate relationship

However, once exploring these ideas we realised that we weren't comfortable as a group to act out these characters and have them falling for one another. We also found that this would show a typical romanctic type film and we wanted to do something different and fresh with our own ideas rather than using those that have already been made into a film. Moreover, it might be a bit too hard to try and portray the romantic feel to the film in just the first 2 minutes of the film opening, as usually the story unfolds and makes the audience realise later on in the film that it is a romantic film and how they go about telling the story.

The second genre we looked at was a teen drama. This genre is very broad and allows us to take the film into any direction we wanted to. Meaning that it could be about anything to do with teens and their lives.
Some ideas we came up with were:-
- Teenager having problems from their peers
- Teenager suffering from family problems
- Teenagers encountering something they didnt expect
- Following typical teenage life

- Shows the positives and negatives to teenagers lives

- Social class hierarchy's

- School/college based problems

- Friendship disasters

- Teenage aspirations

- Teenagers portraying family relationships

- Teenage love and the understanding of it

- Social groups

- Teenage phases

The list could pretty much go on and on and therefore found that we really liked these ideas as we are teenagers ourselves, and could therefore relate and make the film opening better as it will be from a teenagers point of view as well as being able to take these ideas and develop them in any way we wanted to.

Finally we looked at comedy. Again this is a very broad genre to look at and we could take our film any way we wanted to. However, we did realise that it could be very hard to achieve as some comedy isn't always to everyones taste. For example, something that i find funny might not humour someone else. This would therefore cause a problem before we have even started any of our filming or even thinking about where we want to take our film and what sort of humour we want to show. Moreover, it would be hard to show in just 2 minutes rather than a full film, this could make the film opening seem boring. There could also be the ambiguity of the film being funny because its meant to be, or funny because of the poor acting (as we are not professional actors and actresses) in which case we would be laughed at for our work, which is not what we want to happen.

Regardless of these points we still explored the different ideas that we could use for a comedy genre film. some of these were:-
- Following someones life and all the bad things that happen to them
- Having humourous characters feature within the film, therefore allowing small parts of the film being funny and not all of it
-Characters being deadly serious about something, yet the audience will find really funny, e.g a character loving another characters hair, but it actually looks really hideous.

- Silly characters e.g 'Dumber and Dumber'

- Characters lying about something, but others believing, when its a really bad lie

- People getting hurt e.g tripping up/ falling over

As you can see, we couldn't really think of many ideas and realised that this wouldn't be one of the best choices to chose from. We therefore knew that we really didn't want to do a comedy genre film as it would be too hard to go about.

After looking at all these ideas we all agreed on producing a teen drama film. We thought that the ideas from this genre were the strongest and were more able to achieve with the time limit that we were given to work with.

One of the main things that gave us inspiration for how we would execute and go about our film was one image that we took, when we visited the garment district.



This image was basically the starting point and gave us a vision of how we wanted our film to look and what it would constist of. We liked the thought of someone being by the canal and maybe being a dishearten character. Going back to our ideas list we thought that it might be good to shoot the character being upset over either their peers or a family member. This would therefore make it very personal and would allow us to understand the reasons why as the film went on.