BFI Study Day (Part one) #34

BFI Study Day (Part One)

Blog Post #34

On Thursday 21st November, the AS media group and I visited British Film Institute (BFI) as part of an educational school trip. Whilst visiting the BFI; which is located in London (southbank) I had learnt various factors that can help me with my final opening title sequence, which i wasn't aware of prior to the trip. Within this blog I will be going into depth of how the trip was an some of the key information regarding opening title sequences. 

Pete Fraser

Time schedule of the day

When we first arrived at the BFI, we were given a copy of a time schedule of the day and how the day will be taken place, below is a copy of the scheduled day:

Our day first began with Pete Fraser going through 5 aspects of when analysing an opening title sequence. 

           

Lecture theatre we were sitting in
amongst other schools

                                            These five aspects were:

   Genre
     Narrative (enigma)

                                                       Character

                                                     Atmosphere

                                                         Setting

He then showed us three different opening sequences, the three films he showed us were, catch me if you can, dawn of the dead and napoleon dynamite. Whilst watching these extracts we had to make notes on the individual extracts, after each extract was shown we had a feedback exercise where we had to report our findings and discuss it among peers and the other schools that were in the lecture theatre


CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
(STEVEN SPIELBERG - 2002)

'Catch me if you can'

Whilst taking notes I wrote that 'Catch me if you can' consisted of the most elements of enigma this is because the animated opening title sequence itself had a guy running away from .a another man, this made me think to myself 'why is this man running away?' and 'who is he?' because I had not seen the film before. Also the animation takes places in different scenery which makes the audience such as me establish the scene, the that the opening title sequence consists of a plane and a man running to to a taxi suggests an 'On the Run' type of film as well as the title of the film can further suggest this.

DAWN OF THE DEAD

(ZACK SNYDER - 2004)

'Dawn of the dead'

As regards to the 'Dawn of the Dead' opening sequence, I mainly focused on making notes on the narrative, this is because the way this opening sequence is portrayed is rather mysterious, and the choice of colours (Black and Red) suggest death, blood and violence. Also the choice of music was very clever, the song used was 'Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around', after doing some independent research I realised the significance in using this song for this opening sequence, the song itself is sending a message across that one day a man will come to pass judgement; this justifies the fact that this opening title sequence is about death and the lurking creatures/zombies within this film. 

NAPOLEON DYNAMITE

(JARED HESS - 2004)

'Napoleon Dynamite'

The third screening was the opening sequence of 'Napoleon Dynamite', this was the most interesting opening title sequence of all three shown, as Pete said 'the sequence to this is a really novel way of showing this'  however it shows us a sense of characters which is part f one of the five aspects, however there was only one character shown which was Napoleon himself; his face was shown in a ID card. A quick little trivia which I found interesting was that the food shown in this opening sequence was eaten throughout the film itself in separate scenes. 

Images Courtesy of: Art of the Title