Wednesday 23 September 2009

Juno Title Sequence.



For the past week, our assessment at Coleridge has been to recreate the opening to the film Juno. For this task, we had to to shoot the task on site, therefore only being able to use the mise en scene surrounding us.

Our first task was to get in to our groups; mine consisting of Tom H, Yasmin and Louis, and had to watch the Juno sequence over and over to create a storyboard and write down what happens and when(we had practiced making a storyboard with the Shifty work, of course I already knew from last year's course as well)
We had a little while to get costume sorted, unfortunately, our entire class seemed to lack red hoodies! Luckily our group was able to get hold of one in time for filming.
The other props we need to get was a large carton/bottle of Sunny D or other orange drink, we also needed a chair, guitar and television, we decided to make these props out of cardboard and used a real chair- in the end it gives off the Juno feel.

The day of filming and our member of our team keeping hold of the storyboard was ill that day, so we had to do with only three members and no storyboard, luckily we had our sequence written down scene by scene.
Before shooting, I had a look around Coleridge site for ideal spots to film certain scenes, I think the places I chose were used well and also looked good on film.
I started off doing the camerawork, but I thought I was too shaky so Tom took over from me. I sorted out the mise en scene for each scene and directing the shots.
We improvised a few things, but if you watch our final piece you'll see that it's not too bad.

After we had finished filming, we went back to the classroom and started to edit our pieces together, in time with the music and original Juno sequence.
After the weekend, Louis was back in our group so the both us restarted the editing on another mac, from scratch.
Louis and I made sure each shot was perfect timing with the original sequence and cut down the music so it started at the exact same point, unfortunately since Louis had been away, we were not able to create titles for our video.
We started off by using the technique I know, razorblading each scene we don't want out of our video, but Pete showed us an easier and quicker way, in and out points on the original recording. This way was a lot quicker but I found it very confusing because I was used to the razorblade and also the keys on the mac keyboards in Coleridge are very confusing!
Me and Louis shared different scenes out, he'd do one then I would and so on, and I also showed him how to speed up and slow down sequences, we did this quite a lot because our scenes were either too short or too long to fit with the soundtrack.
We were also missing a part of the sequence(looking down at her feet) so me & my partner decided to add a bit of the unused footage of Yasmin's feet for the remaining time instead.

I like editing videos together, but I have always disliked doing it with other people, however I enjoyed working with Louis on our video.
However, I did not like the choice of film we were doing, if I was to do this task again I'd like each group to have a different film opening to re-create, not all the same one as it got very irritating with the soundtrack.

The original video can be found at Shadowplay.

The clip I chose to analyize from both the videos is the one of Juno walking head up, birds eye view. Obviously, this would've been difficult to re-create, so we came up with the idea of the actress to be on her knees, with shoes on them, looking up, wilst leaves were being thrown towards her to give a similar effect.
I really liked how it came out- it gave a unique effect to our piece and also a comical feel at the same time. We also repeated this idea later on, but instead of throwing fallen leaves, we held a branch and moved it across the camera to give the idea that she is walking under trees.

Our sweded version.

Original Juno sequence.


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