Analysis of mysterious rider

Our opening sequence involves a mysterious rider hunting down the boys and sabotaging the Yorkshire Dales annual bike race. This part was played by myself (Freddie), we wanted to present to the audience a character they could fear on the behalf of the boys, and interpret as evil, threatening, and dangerous. We also wanted this to unsettle the playfulness and innocence of their child-like bike race, and turn it into a much darker affair.

Red hoodie

I decided to wear this hoodie for the opening sequence, because me and the other members of the group intended for the character I was playing to come across to the audience as threatening, dangerous, and bad. I wore red because it opposed the other characters' costumes, and made my character stand out. The colour red is often a connotation of blood, and blood can represent death, and murder, etc, and so you get the drift of what we intended the audience to feel. I also wore the hood up for the scenes i was in, because we felt the character was hiding his identity, (this created interest for the audience, and also a worry for who this person could be) and also added to the threatening and dark feel I felt I had really already accomplished.

Black trousers

I think the colour black represents evil in a lot of films or animations, such as the Grim reaper, or, Darth Vadar from Star Wars, every character put in black is almost always bad, and evil; this is why we wanted this character to be wearing black trousers. So that as soon as they saw him for the first time about a minute into the opening of the film, when he's crouching behind a tree in his dark red hoodie, with the hood up, and these dark trousers on, holding a brick, the audience suddenly think, "oh no, he's bad", obviously the brick projects a lot of this, but the costume also coincides with the evilness of the character.

- Freddie Meade

Filming our opening sequence

We filmed the majority of clips for our opening sequence in January 2009, we chose certain days because they were dates everybody we needed was available, and also because according to the weather reports, these days were ‘rainy and overcast’. Weather-wise, the days we filmed on were ideal because we wanted to create a pathetic fallacy in which the audience thought our protagonist was in danger, and to also let on foreboding thoughts to draw the audience's attention. The location for our filming is slightly out of town, in the grange woods. It was quite far from where we all lived, so we cycled there, of course, this was ideal because our bikes were vital props for our opening sequence. About a month after our original filming dates; after we had then received feedback from our classmates, we decided to return to the location, and collect new and improved shots, and also re-film shots that didn't come out as well as we had hoped for. We also later went to Simon’s house to collect clips we had decided to add in.

Before filming, we needed to establish who was acting and when. In our first scene, Alex was the only actor needed, this left the 3 remaining members of the group, crowded around the camera. Our second scene required Myself (Freddie), Alex, Simon, Sam, Alex M, and James. Ryan was also in parts of the clips towards the end, although, this didn't require much filming, and we also decided to remove these clips from our final production. This made Ryan the main director of this scene, as he wasn‘t acting. However, me, Alex and Simon contributed to filming whatever clips our acting wasn't required in.

- Freddie Meade

Plan of changes after receiving feedback

We showed the rough cut of our work to our teacher and class mates, they gave us feedback on what they liked about our opening sequence, and more importantly, what could be improved. The constructive criticism gave us ideas on how to change and improve different elements of our opening sequence.

Mise en scène
The main comment for mise en scène was that the location gave our opening sequence a lot of dark and badly lighted shots. Reasons for this were because we chose a nearby woods as our location, and on the days we filmed, the weather was overcast and wet. This left us with some good, but badly lighted shots, as we were working in the outdoor, we had to rely on natural lighting as we were limited to what lighting we could use. We decided to amend this by cherry picking the clips with better lighting, and scraping the clips that were making our opening sequence look unlighted and unprofessional.

Camerawork

We were told our camera movements were sometimes jolty and fast, and although this was what we were aiming for, we did soon see that this made the video look unprofessional, and badly filmed. Another problem was that many of the shots were not steadily filmed and we really saw this after our class’ reaction to this. After hearing the feedback for this aspect of our opening sequence, it was clear that this was our biggest letdown. This influenced us to return to our location, and film more steady, less jolty, and generally better clips. This also gave us a chance to use the new ideas we had thought up since originally filming our opening sequence, and collect more shots to work with for our final production.

Editing
We were recommended to make our opening credits more clear, and also suggested by class members, that we should change the positions and times of our current opening credits, to some more convenient and ideal places in the opening sequence. For example, to have names pop up in more appropriate places, or for names to slide across the screen with the movement of a person, or to coincide with the camera shot. We were also told to add some transitions, and although we felt adding transitions would make the opening sequence look tacky and unprofessional, we took our new advice, and added some to our opening sequence, and were pleased with this decision, as it fitted in with the genre we chose to base our film around well.

Sound

By the feedback from our class and teacher on this aspect of the opening sequence, I think they were generally impressed by our choice of sound. The only point that was made about the sound was that because it was especially windy on the day of filming also due to our lack of filming equipment, the uploaded film on the computer played an annoying whistling sound. Obviously, we do not hear this in professional films, therefore it was vital to amend this problem, as we felt this was a potential downfall to our piece. This lead us to a big decision to use music instead of dialogue in a lot of the shots, we did this by cutting down on the amount of dialogue, and even cutting out the shots that were badly affected by wind.

Generic conventions

As our rough cut made our class and teacher laugh from even early on in the opening sequence, we felt that we had met the generic conventions of our chosen genre. The genre we chose for our opening sequence was a family comedy, and after the positive feedback from how it had made people laugh, we felt we had accomplished this aim.

- Freddie Meade

Synopsis of our opening sequence

Protagonist wakes up and finds an advertisement for a bike race in the post. Determined, he decides to take part in this race and cycles down the road, whilst doing this, he finds a green jumper discarded on the floor. The boy then finds himself racing against 3 competitors through a woods in wet and windy conditions. As the race begins to pick up, one of the three competitors is cut off and forced into a ditch. The 3 remaining racers are later approached by an enigmatic rider who injuries one of the boys. (Main character) and the last remaining rider then proceed in their battle, until realising they have been followed by the threatening and mysterious character. At this turning point in the opening sequence, the Yorkshire Dales bike race is turned into a race for their lives.

- Freddie Meade

Credit List

Here is a list of the people who helped and took part in acting, filming, and editing our opening sequence:

Actors (In order of appearance)
Alex Thomson
Simon Williams
Sam Beckwith
Alex Myers
James Sparks
Freddie Meade

Directed and filmed by:
Ryan Balloo
Freddie Meade
Simon Williams
Alex Thomson

Edited by:
Ryan Balloo
Alex Thomson
Simon Williams
Freddie Meade

- Freddie Meade

Prop and costume list

Props list

3 Mountain bikes

1 BMX

Post (including advertisement for race)

Green jumper

Costume list

1 set of: 

Dark red hoodie

Dark clothing

3 sets of:

Coats

Jeans

Bicycle protection

We chose our costumes carefully, basing the outfits on who the characters are, and what they represent. The mysterious character has been put in dark clothing, with also a typically cooler bike (a BMX). As for the 4 other boys, although 3 of them are minor charatcers, we wanted to reduce how threatening they were, to emphasize this on the mysterious character who enters the race midway. I will leave it there, as Ryan has already explained this in one of the posts below. I will write another post specifically on the outfit of the mysterious character later.

- Freddie Meade

Opening title research

Cool Runnings Opening (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUprJqP8Phw)


Donnie Darko Opening (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnKG8C-svaM)


We looked at these films opening sequences for inspiration and thought that Donnie Darko's scene on the hill showed the audience the beauty of the area and also that Donnie was there, we felt that this was an effective opening scene and drew influence from it's . Cool runnings is the film that we based our opening sequence on, we thought the titles on cool runnings which come up straight away and are the main feature grabbed the audiences eye. we took this idea of the titles appearing right away but they wern't the main feature as the stroy starts right away aswell. We wanted to include the scene from Donnie Darko but we put it later in the sequence as we didn't have time to explain why he would be on a hill, as is done in Donnie Darko.

- Freddie Meade
- Simon Williams
- Ryan Balloo

Music

The music for our film production was one of the most difficult and time consuming parts of the production. We began the project assuming that we would be able to use any musical piece we wanted. To this end we decided on a song from a game to use early in the planning stages of our production. When we began filming, some of the scenes we filmed were filmed to fit that music.

This is the music originally wanted to use:


However, as the project went on we were told that this was not the case and that we were only allowed to use copyright free music. After we found this out, we then had to find a suitable piece of music that was similar to our original idea and had a feel and pace as good as for close to it, but was from a copyright free source. Our teacher provided us with a list of websites that had a range of songs that were available for use free of copyright. Whilst looking on these websites we sent an email to the company that produces the music we wanted: Valve.

From: Alex Thomson
(alext92@hotmail.co.uk)
Sent: 23 January 2009 12:01:53
To: contact@valvesoftware.com

Dear Sir/MadamI am currently attending the Sixth Form at Beauchamps High School in Essex, England and studying Media A levels As part of the course a group of us have to produce an opening sequence for a fiction film.We have so far finished the filming and the film is in the post production stage.At the beginning of the course, we were told that we were able to use any music we wanted in the film piece, and we thought that your main theme from Team Fortress 2 would be a good piece to use as it fits the pace and genre of our film really well. However, we have recently heard that we are unable to use music unless we got it from a copyright free source. This was a big problem for our group as we had already had chosen, and based our film-work around the music.It was therefore suggested to us, by our teacher to contact you and ask for permission to use the Team Fortress 2 main theme. If we gained this permission, and provided evidence it would be acceptable to the exam board for us to use the music.As this a school course it will be a non-profit production and used purely for educational purposes; our audience will be the teacher and the exam moderator at OCR. The work will not be reproduced outside this context. Please consider my request, thanks. If this is not the correct contact address for this problem then it would be very helpful to me if you could put me in contact with the correct people. Yours sincerely
Alex Thomson
Unfortunately, after sending this e-mail to Valve, we received no reply and after three weeks of waiting we gave up on ever getting a reply from them. This was very disappointing as we had to go with the less suitable music choice from the free music websites.

The music tracks we chose were from freeplaymusic.com and are called Wings of the wind, a calm track we indented to use for the first scenes of the character waking up. The second song we chose to use is titled; Bounty. This song would be used for the main race scenes, we chose this song for its fast pace and similarity to our original idea.

In the first scenes of our production piece, the character is just waking up in the morning as such we wanted to portray a stereotypical morning scene. This music is good for this purpose. Also it was important for the music to be very light, calm and contrastable to our other music for the race scenes. The switch between these two songs is also very important, as it marks the point at which we see the characters determination for the biker bike race. The race music reflects the sense of speed and determination we wanted for our characters and the scenes in general.

The downloaded files from the website were in M4A format, so we had to use the Xillisoft Audio Maker Software to convert them into MP3’s so they would be compatible with the Adobe editing software we were using.

The end result of the music, while not being what we originally wanted, and therefore not as good as it could be, was still quite good and overall we are pleased and happy with the end result


-Alex Thomson

Clothes

To get an idea on what style and theme of clothes we should choose for our piece we looked at films of a similar genre and the clothes used in those films. We were limited to wearing thick or many layers of clothes due to cold weather conditions but we chose to use casual affordable clothes to represent the characters’ age group. The chosen clothes match the area, time period and genre. We chose bland, colourless clothes to take attention away from the riders and place it more on the scenery, as it was more important. The antagonist in the film is dressed in a bright red top to emphasise the hostility of his character and help define him in unclear shots.

During the first part of the film the main character is wearing plain black clothing to represent the plainness and lack of ambition in the character. Once he becomes concerned with winning the race he also finds an item of green clothing, which marks his enthusiasm and determination about the race, we chose him to wear it throughout the race as a way of separating the initial unenthusiastic character from the more positive and determined character seen in the second half of the piece.

- Ryan Balloo

Location

We looked at other films of the same genre of ours, which we decided was sports comedy; we looked at cool runnings because it shared a few of our conventions. Donnie Darko was another film we looked at and thought the location at the start of the film where Donnie wakes up on a hill looked good. Obviously we couldn’t find a nearby mountain so we decided a hill and bikes would be good, this is where we took an idea from cool runnings to base it on a sports comedy.

The location we used was a spinney going down a steep hill; this was perfect for bike-orientated theme of our opening sequence. We chose a day to film when it was very wet and windy, the mud and cold added another layer of filming and provided pathetic fallacy. The location provides us with opportunities to use different shots; the banks of the spinney are higher than the track so we could use establishing and panning shots. The corners gave us the opportunity to do dramatic shots of the riders and to zoom in on individual’s faces and get close up shots.

We were able to add some match on action when we filmed the opening parts to the sequence at my house. We chose my house as the location for the opening sequence because it was the nearest house available to the spinney and it allowed us to do some interesting shots in the garage and outside.

- Simon Williams

Our original choice of music

The clip below shows a sample of the music we originally wanted to use for our opening sequence. However, this choice of music was not from a copyright-free source, therefore, we were left no choice but to resort to a less fitting and copyright-free substitute for the final piece.



- Freddie Meade