evaluation of opening sequence

Evaluation of opening sequence

Our opening sequence is a crime caper and it involves a girl planning to rob a bank. There is many generic conventions that are in our scene and are used in many other typical crime capers. We have shots identifying the scene (the bank) where the main character is targeting. There is various shot types such as standing shots of the area and some zooming shots. Our opening sequence develops these conventions by sticking to a simple and easy to follow story line, which is typical of the crime caper genre, we were influenced by films such as the bank job.
Conventionally in bank robbery films or crime capers there is a strong male lead or an ensemble cast. Our opening sequence does not stick to these conventions and we chose to use a female lead. She is a young girl and of fairly upper class background. This represents gender and makes the female main character seem dominant. This would affect our target audience and make it more appealing to girls.
I think our film would be suited to a smaller studio for distribution because it is in a minimalistic style. Also it would not appeal to a very large audience, as it does not conform to typical crime caper conventions. Regardless of this I think it would still appeal to a different audience and market. It is set in the centre of town. This gives the film an authentic look.
Our film would mainly appeal to everyone over 18 but also as the main character is a female we tried to focus on the older women market. The audience can put themselves in the position of the main character as she is an average person doing something very out of the ordinary and the audience may see her as a role model. There is a point of view shot facing the bank, which shows exactly where the character is facing. This helps the audience get in the characters shoes.
For our opening sequence we used the school cameras and equipment. It was quite difficult to do tracking shots of the characters feet as she was walking. The camera was quite shakey in places. We used quite good props which make the film look more genuine and believable. The editing software was very useful and we managed to get everything in the right place and shots lasted for the right amount of time. For our soundtrack we used garage band. The soundtrack did not last long enough so we had to repeat some of it. This may not work as well with our film but as it is quite short I think it was okay. The style of music we chose conformed to our genre of the crime caper.
We planned our film very differently to how it turned out. The story line slightly changed due to not having the right people to be in the film all at once. We decided to change the setting of our film as we thought it would work better with our new and changed story line. We still kept to the genre but changed slightly what the characters did. There is still a wide range of shots. The animatic that we created helped our planning very well. We used this to help remember what shot types to use and where the film was going to be set. The research on the genre of crime caper was quite helpful, as we did not have much idea of what opening sequences of this genre involved. The mood board we created gave us an insight to what kind of mise en scene and props we would use.
I think our final product was quite successful but could have lasted longer if we could have had the whole cast there at once. This would have helped us to elaborate on our sequence and continue it in the same way we started.