Note to the Moderator

Dear Moderator

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to view my blog and my group's blog, and I hope you enjoy viewing them!

Underneath a picture of myself and a section about me you will be able to find a list of links: a blog archive of all my posts, a list of labels so you can view sections of my blog easily, a link to my group blog, and a link to our main teacher's blog, where you can also view everyone else's blogs easily too.

On my individual blog you will find all the independent research, planning and production of the project which you are free to observe and easy to find under "labels" on the right hand side of my blog. There is also a post on the preliminary task we completed at the beginning of the year, and seven posts on my evaluation of the main task, which I completed once our opening sequence was finished. At the top of the page I have also added the videos for my preliminary and main task, making them easily accessible and allowing you to view the videos as often and as many times as you like!

On our group blog you will be able to find all the research, planning and production we did together to produce our main task, and they have all been labelled accordingly to allow you to view our posts at ease. Each post is also labelled with the name(s) of the members which contributed to the post, so you can also see how we each contributed to the group blog, as well as our individual ones.

The blog archive has all my post in chronological order, so hopefully you wont get lost and can find your way around easily, so you may receive the complete experience I received while doing this task.

I very much enjoyed doing this project, although it has been challenging at times. It has been really a Roller-coaster and i have learnt so much from it. I'm also very pleased with my work and groups work all together.

Thanks again for viewing my blog, I hope that you like all my posts, and hope you enjoy watching my prelim and final piece.

Natasha Jalonen Candidate No: 2331

This blog is now closed

Hope you enjoyed vewing the my post. Thank you! :)

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For this question I will split my answer into four sections so that I can cover every aspect of forms and conventions of media. I will be looking at; our chosen genre conventions; typical narrative structures conventions of movies; forms of conventions and functions of media; and the form of style real media would have.


Genre

Our primary genres of our film is action/thriller, along with our sub-genres such as mafias, assassins and crime. My group researched into the primary genres making sure our opening scene contains conventions of these genres straight away. Thriller contains tension and suspense; we did this by having a lot of close up to build up enigma with in our audience. Action brings challenges, and exciting activity of the unusual; an assassination to our opening sequence brought climax and action.  

Here is one of our main inspirational opening sequence with similar genre and conventions:

Elements that our character "Lotus" have with Leon:

• Silent killer,shadowy assassin.
• Targets bad organisation/ mafias
• Cold and doesn't connect with people well
• Brought up in the business as a professional assassin

One of our main sub-genres is assassination but particularly female assassins. We have noticed how popular they have become, as there have been a number of these genre films. It breaks the normal convention of an assassin action film, as usually the protagonist would be a male. My group loved the idea of a female assassin as it would attract more audience; mainly more females. Here are our main female assassin films: 

In particular we had our main inspiration from "Kill Bill".

Narrative Structure 

Conventions of an action/drama film: - Todorov’s theory of narrative: equilibrium – disruption – resolution - restoration 
- Barthe’s theory of enigma code
- Levi-Strauss’s theory of binary opposites


These are all conventions and theories you would find in every single movie, this is how we included them into our opening sequence:

·    Todorov: It’s impossible to show a full consistency of Todorov theory in our opening sequence of only 2 minute. However we are able to show the equilibrium as we have the normal life of Lotus as an assassin.  Although we didn’t need to make the rest of the film my group had in mind of the whole film.

·    It is very important to follow Todorov theory as it builds the story structure in a simple clear way, which every film has to have, to help not only the production team but the audience to understand the film. Our story line is similar of  "Haywire"where she is let down by the people she worked for.


      Barthes: We have really followed Barthes theory by having enigma codes straight from the beginning to keep the audience interested and engaged.  At the start we have a quote from the bible relating to our film to get the audience to start thinking and working their brains. We then have many close ups so the whole picture isn’t clear but they can understand and focus on few things to think about. all the iconography of the drink, cigar and drugs all relates to a crook, a baddie which we want the audience to think of the man. We do not see his face until the end making the audience wonder who he is and what is he doing. We then see he is a relaxed man enjoying his riches. However we make sure we continue the enigma by bringing the main character Lotus in a shadowy form. This keeps the audience engaged as they know want to know about this character and why she has come to kill him? 

·     
      Our main inspirations for this style of convention was from "Dexter". This is an opening TV drama with many close up shots of normal daily life images making them look horrifying building enigma to the audience. 



      Levi-Strauss:  We have clear distinct binary opposites of male Vs female. We have the man who seems to have it all and since he is a male you would think he has the upper hand, however lotus comes in and kills him showing a twist, of female power. There is a clear difference in moods in our opening sequence with the different characters: the beginning is calm, with classical music and the man is relax. We see a binary opposite when the main actor comes in Lotus and disrupts it building tension, with a faster pace music. We don't have a clear distinction  of binary opposite when it comes to good Vs evil as our hero presents herself as very cold. However we see some good as she kills the villain, who is obviously a crook as he has a lot of money, has drugs and indulges in cigars and drinks. We would call her a flawed heroin. This is similar to "Salt" where from the beginning we believe she is the bad guy, who will assassin the Russian president, she doesn't help herself by running away and killing others. Until the end we see she is a true hero. 

Form

Here are few conventions, functions and typical features of a film that we have done our best to incorporate:

• To introduce the main characters
• To introduce the main themes/ establish what is going on the film
• To engage the audience, and make them want to carry on watching it
• To show the credits to the audience, e.g. distributor, director, producer, main actors...etc. 

We mislead the audience at start by thinking the man is the main character, however he doesn't even survive till the end of the opening sequence. However, he introduces the coldness and power of our female assassin, "Lotus". We was going to have the title the name of our main character (just like the film "Hannah", but we wanted to make her more mysterious, so the audience are engaged by her; wanting to know more and we only reveal half of her face at the end of the opening sequence, to build a climax of suspense through out.

We have a very distinctive theme of stylised connotation, making sure our music and our titles fit into this. We use classical music to set this and our titles are quite simple but fancy and pleasing to the eye. We also have made sure we have set up the genres and themes of the movie.

We have clearly set up enigma from the start to keep the audience engaged so they continue watching as the are curious about our characters. We  have added action as it is an action film and our target audience would want action straight from the start so that they wont get bored.

Here are examples of our titles:

• At the top we have the distributor the production and who is the film by (director)

• Middle we have the Main title showing how its stand out as it has an animation unlike the others plus the director which we have put at the end of the 2minute opening sequence to show there is more titles to come as it is meant to be a full movie. 

• At the bottom we have the main characters of the movie: Natasha as Lotus and Raef as the Mafia leader. we also have a quote which starts the opening sequence to get the audience in the thinking mood and captivated of the movie. The quote describes our character characteristics as she is a flawed heroin, who seems dark to those who are dark but she does what she does for the good.
  

Style


 We looked at different styles of movies and noticed they kept a consistency of their style throughout. We have done this through our camera work, editing and other functions of our movie. We want our film to be very stylised, where everything has a deep concept to it. 

• Our classical music gives us this as you find in movies such as "God father" having the gang leader listening to classical music which is ironic as he deals with such chaos and violence in his life. we also used our music to build tension just like horror films like "Psycho"  known for its disturbing music. We wanted a contrast to Lotus theme music which is up beat and full of action like our character. This is similar to "James bond" films where he has his themed music which represents him to the audience. The classical music is diegetic while Lotus theme music is non-digetic.
• The titles are simple but stand out, as they are a white colour on black background. this keeps the stylised simplicity and classical feel to the film. It was my suggestion to add the growing line which I had seen from “the Kings Speech” which I found had that classic look we were looking for. We made sure out title “Deadly Shadow” had a different effect to stand out just like other film main titles.  Here is the Kings speech titles on the left and ours:

• When filming we had a clear idea of what kind of shoots we wanted to give stylised camera work. Showed a varied style of shots, having long shots, focus pull, close ups and being creative by using hand held to get shot that would be impossible with the tripod. We did this to keep the audience engaged as it would get boring if the got the same view through the whole film. By having different angels they can see from different perspective.You tend to find focus pull and tilted images in thriller movies, to give that eerie feel, making the audience unsettled and uncomfortable. Just like we hope ours does.

• We have a focus pull of the man turning the music up at the top

• We have a low titled angle of Lotus as she leaves giving that distorted feeling and power she has.

• We get right into the action by having a extreme close up of the cigar.

• When editing we kept the continuity theory rules; such as match on action, 180 degree rule and 30 degree rule. We have seen this through out other movies as it helps the audience follow the story. The purpose of continuity editing is to smooth over the inherent discontinuity of the editing process and to establish a logical coherence between shots. This goes for editing of the music so that it is in sync with the cuts and shots of the opening sequence.  
• We also looked at films such as "Underworld" where their grading is all dark and blue, we took this on board as both having action thriller genre, we decided to make our grading dark and blue tint. this gave our opening sequence the essence of coldness atmosphere up holding the tension.

2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our particular social group: Females

Our focus is the representation of females since our main character is a female. This was challenging the typical gender stereotype. We normally see women as the victims "the princess who needs saving". Here is Jane from "spider man" a typical action film :

• She wears girly clothes ; wearing pink vest
• She is the girl the main character likes. 
• She is treated like a lady, no action or challenges
• She gets rescued by spider-man 
• Not about her mainly spider-man.

• She wears all black, leather (tough material)
• Nothing revealing, serious business looking, dressed to kill.
• Action, she is a killer. Wont expect a girl to kill
• She does the rescuing 
• No romance, difficult for her while in this profession 
• Movie is all about her. 

Lately there has been many films with a leading female actor in action films. We took our inspirations from many of these films such as "Kill Bill": 

In this image she is wearing a leather suite although it is not black like lotus it is yellow which could mean danger for some people.  she holds a long knife which you wont expect a lady to hold. another stereotypical convention is of blond girls being very ditsy and and girly, here we see she is a strong violent character.  We see numerous times during the film her over powering not only females but men such as the showdown with Bill. Lotus also over powers men straight from the start. However the only difference is Lotus is a full time assassin(her job) while Beatrix is revenge driven.  On the other hand equally they both represent the same power. 

This whole convention of strong females brings more female audience to come and watch, as they love the idea of women in power. Makes many women feel good about themselves and encourages independence.

How Lotus is in control in the opening sequence:

• Methodical and calculating in her actions when she appears behind the glass.
• The gun to the head changes his mood from relaxed to tensed, making him sit up .
• Quick clear up shows she is in control of her actions and consequence.
• When leaving she looks back and down to show she is satisfied with her job and still in control.

3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

- Our production company is called Sigma Production which was created by us. Sigma which comes from maths, holding the notion of solving and mystery, which we would thought if we was to be a real production company we would only make films with strong concept, mystery and action; just like Lotus. We said it is an independent British production company, however not niche films, quite broad films filled with action, but hold the British aspect of arty film.

We would need other studio backing our production for example "Relativity Media" who produced Haywire.




-The company distributing our film is Miramax films as we found that it had distributed a lot of films with difficult themes and concept just like ours. Also producing indie British films such as The Queen and The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas. It also distributes action films such as The Kill Bill Films and The Lookout. The kill bill being one of our main inspiration we felt as through Miramax would have to be our distributor. We also felt it is not such a huge distributor but well known in getting our film international, as our film has an international character. We don’t have a specific location of the movie setting as originally we was going to add a scene with Lotus boss being in Hollywood which would have shown the international concept of our film while Lotus was in London. We still keeping the idea of the film international setting through out the movie. This means it is not just an English indie movie and has potential in being very successful hopefully international, as it has a combination of English production and American distribution.

- At first we thought of getting the movie into festivals such as BFI London Film Festival which is in October. This could possibly be where Miramax could observe how well we did and offer to be the distributor or we find other willing distributors. Or another main one would be London Latin American film festival as it has the combination of London and American films. No matter what we would take the film to mainly British and American film festivals.

- Along with the distributor we hoping it is exhibited in the many cinema chains, such as cineworld , vue and international multiples cinema chains being previewed for a couple of weeks. Along with this, we would have successful marketing of poster, trailers and now facebook pages/groups to get it full promoted to our target audience.


Example of Facebook promoting:

4) Who would be the audience for your media product?

Profile of our ideal target audience:

Age: 16-24
Gender: Male and female
Nationality: Mainly British and America

Film interests: Action, thriller
Lifestyle: Film Fans, moderate to high income, students/workers, come to cinema to relax/unwind or outing with friends or partner.

Summary of target audience :Core target audience action thriller fans, different ethnicity, however mainly British or American as it is produced by a British production team and distributed by and American distributor.

I got this of the Internet but they are the perfect examples of our target audience as they look like they are into action and are out going! The girls are not fancy dressed like glamor women just casual, and the males are not smartly dressed but casual. We also have different ethnicity. 



First of all our genre is action and thriller which men tend to prefer to watch than movies such as romantic films. So immediately this attracts the young men as they would love action unlike older men who would prefer more psychological drama or more historic meaningful movies. Also all the sub-genres such as guns and assassins would be too much for younger boys. We also thought that the younger males would love to watch this since the female is a young woman and they would be attracted to her. 


We have a twist in our action thriller movie were normally the antagonist is played by a male character; however we have chosen our movie to be about a strong female character. Action films are not so popular with women; however with a leading female role it will attract much more female audience. As our main character represents female empowerment, which in our society there has been a lot of talk about women rights and in the modern day we see how much woman have evolved in status. So we attract a lot of feminists.  Also looking through movies that have been coming out we saw a huge trend this days of leading female assassin movies and they have done extremely well; such us "Colombiana”, “Salt” and “kill bill”. Also from research out of a Film’s list of the 100 Greatest Female Characters in movies, ‘38 are a character in someone else’s story. 25 of those are primarily a love interest. Approximately 1/5 do not survive their film.’ So having a main female leading role would be different and attract more.


The classical music separates it from being a children film or young adult film as young children audience won’t appreciate the music so much. We however have the more upbeat music toward the end which again separates it from young adults to much older adults. 


We would also have a secondary market of fans of psychology films such as slightly older adults, as they would still enjoy the film as it contains a lot of strong concept and mystery themes which can get them thinking as it contains a lot of enigma. 

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

Firstly through our sequence of events we took the audience straight away into the theme of mystery by creating a lot of enigma shots with specific iconography of the genre Thriller/action; which the audience would be fans of. They would want to immediately continue watching to feed their curiosity.  For example; everyone in some way is attracted to money so when we see the shot of money in the briefcase the audience want to know how he got that money and what will happen to it?

We had this idea mainly from "Dexter" the series opening and "Se7en"

I have watched both movie and TV serious and I found their opening sequence very captivating.

We changed the atmosphere to stop the audience from getting bored but also keep them in ganged by bringing in the main character "lotus". We see the shadow of Lotus coming which cause uneasiness for the audience as they cant warn the man who is relaxed and they are unsure of what the shadow is.  As soon as they see it is a female they are shocked as it is unusual for a female to bring such fear.  Although they expected her to attack the man with the gun, we wanted them to feel his shock when she put the gun on his head. We did this by playing with the music and timing the shot with a bang in the music. 

Through our characters we attracted our target audience. Although our actors are teenagers we tried to make them look much older. The man was in a suite and had facial some facial hair; it helped picking the oldest looking teenager. Lotus which was played by myself, I straightened my hair which gave me a more mature look. We put simple make-up not too much so that I didn’t give that womanly look of glam but more of seriousness. It helped I was wearing black as it not associated with young people as teenagers are more about fashion and colour. The leather jacket and gloves also gave a feel of womanly sexiness. We also had the man dealing with cigars and whiskey which teenagers won’t do at all, some smoke but only cigarettes and some drink but tends to be vodka. Also Lotus is a killer which we won’t find a teenager being professional at. Mostly important we appealed to the female target audience by having our main character played by a female.

Through editing, we also made sure that all continuity rules were not broken, so that it would look easy on their eyes, and help them to suspend their disbelief. 


We Promoted our film through Facebook, as a large percentage of our target audience use social networking site. Although the creator of the Facebook group was Francis, I shared the link to my page so that more people will receive the information. As I have more female friends it was essential I promoted it as I could gather more female audience. We also did it the traditional way by Positing up adverts around the school specially where our target audience would see them. 

After finishing our project we held a preview screening of our opening sequence in our school's media block, and asked our audience to fill out a simple questionnaire. Below is our questionnaire: 

 

Here are a few filled in questionnaires that we received (One female and one male):

After looking through all the questionnaires, here is a summary of trends and patterns I have noticed through looking at the feedback from the audience : 

• Overall we believe it was a very successful screening as enough people came and we had many great feed backs. 
• We had a clear distinction between males and females views, the females gave it over all a higher rating then boys, which we had expected. 
• They understood the genre very well, many nearly all said either action or thriller 
• They all hit in the target audience range, however mainly saying 18+
• They had a rough idea of who the characters were, some had no idea about Lotus, but that was the point to keep the audience wanting to watch more of the film to find out more about this character. 
• They sort of established the key concept of the film, which are drugs, money, criminal activity, assassins, violence and guns. 
• They understood that the man was in debt and Lotus was sent to kill him. 
• Everyone said it worked well as an opening sequence. 

The main points that people liked was:

• The music; they said great choice many actually knew the piece 
• The titles 
• The gun shot, when screening it some gasped, or were shocked, which was a brilliant feedback as that was what we was aiming for. Many were very impressed with it.
• The build up of characters, specially lotus reveal at the end 
• The creativity of the shots.

The Main points that should be improved:

• When screening it there was a static noise which we will get sorted out soon as possible but we are still not sure why there was some. 
• Only a few said more suspense when Lotus walks in. 
• Also a funny improvement was that someone wanted a sexier assassin.

Other that not many improvements at all, which is fantastic feedback for us after hard weeks of work.

6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Technologies/hardware/software used during the process of constructing our opening sequence:
Production: Camera, tripod, microphone, headphones, light

Post Production: Computer Software: Adobe Premiere, Live Type, Adobe After Effects

What have I learnt during the process of making our opening sequence?

-Already knowing the basic of how to work the camera tripod, microphone and headphones from our prelim; I however learnt how to use manual settings on the camera. I used this especially when trying to get a focus pull. We used this often, such as the man drinking, putting it on the table and sitting back. This was very effective as we don’t see him until this but yet it’s still a blur to still keep the element of mystery.  

- I know how to use the basic tools and gadgets on Adobe Premiere. I learnt new things such as tools used for colour grading (the Three Way Colour Corrector and ProcAmp) this really helped to bring a better atmosphere that was needed. We used many different tools and gadget such as slowing the shot and others which we learnt from our technician or YouTube. 

The software: Adobe Premiere Pro



This is theThree Way Colour Corrector tool.



This is the ProcAmp, that controls the lighting

Example: Here is the original footage

Here when we used ProcAmp, making it darker.

Here is when using Three way colour corrector, we added a blue tint.

Here is a half screen shots of our original on the left and edited on our right. 

- I also learnt how to use the software Live Type on the Mac and add all the effects, and we used this to make the titles of our opening sequence. We had difficulty in choosing the right font and effects to get the perfect look as there was so much on it. All our titles were made on live type which was very useful and easy. 

- I especially learnt how to use Adobe after Effects, as I played around with it to make an effective title which was brilliant, however we felt it didn’t suite our film (it was to oriental). We especially used it for special effects of the gun shot which we learnt from looking at YouTube clips and help from our technician. We learnt the process, found it a bit difficult but the end product was beautiful. This helped the film suspend the audience disbelief and it added action and thrill. 

This is the title lotus with out the extensions

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lotus with extensions at a different time frame

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Picture with out special effect on the left with only make up effects, on the right original image with blood splatter





From what I’ve learnt, what would I do differently in hindsight?

- If we had had time or could have done anything differently I would have a re-shoot of some of our shots which looked grainy. We solved this by grading it and changing colours but it was still noticeable in my eyes, not the audience.

- Be organised with props, as our rough shot had many items missing. The fact that we had a rehearsal shoot made it much better, as we could see all the missing objects and see what worked and didn’t. 

-We had a lot of problem with our titles.  We spent a lot of times on them towards the end. Maybe next time we would find the right title first or at the same time as the music. 

- In the research of conventions of movie we forgot to add in a specific location however we could pass ignore it as the opening sequence would be longer than 2 minuets as the titles do go on and the next scene could have a clear location.

7) Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Brief for the preliminary task:
‘Continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanged a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.’

Brief for main task:
‘The titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes.’

Why did we do the prelim task beforehand, and what did it teach me?
The prelim task provided us with some experience of shooting and filming a sequence; especially for me since I haven’t done media in GCSE so everything was new to me. We had to focus on the main theory of filming; continuity. It made us realise how much you need to consider when filming. Also we were able to go through editing process, still applying the continuity rules. This taught us how important it was to cut shots together to make a sequence flow seamlessly and make it easy to understand, but also appealing to the audience

 Example match on action in our prelim:

Pre-production:
The prelim task helped me to learn that story-boarding is a key part of pre-production, and is definitely needed during production, to make shooting times quicker, easier, and more efficient.  We took it a step further by making an animation which really helped us see the flow of how our production would be like; but also help with the post-production later on. 

Our prelim and main task were organised the same way; having location, story, script etc. However in our main task we had to also present a treatment which was presented to our teacher. Only if it sounded completely organised and clear, we were given the green light and moved on to planning of production and production itself. 

We had one complication to our original idea, we wanted to film in Hollywood as we was staying at a nice hotel and thought it would be a great location however when filming we had not done a run through so we had a slow start and not alot of time but also we found out we was not allowed to shoot there. This definately taught us to be more organised in our next shoot and having gone through the scene and making sure everything is in order and in place. Most importantly getting access to filmming in our choosen location. Just like a real film industry would have to do if filming off site of their studios.

So from the pre-production of the prelim and the final project, I learnt that planning is key and essential to make production go smoothly and without any complications, and the use of storyboarding and location are very important. As this is what the outside film industries would have to go through.  

Anna Francis Natasha Shot List

Production:

The most important thing that I learnt from the production of the prelim task in my opinion is the issue of time. We had a very tight schedule to film all our shots for our prelim, and this knowledge of time management helped in the shooting of our final project. Except our main task was on a bigger scale meaning it would require more effort on keeping time which we did find a bit difficult as things went wrong or something was missing. The prelim also helped us know exactly how to film without supervision taking care of equipment and shooting the perfect shots when it came to the main task, as we were all experienced with the equipment .

NEED TO INSERT BEHIND SCENES VIDEO

The prelim also gave us the knowledge of shot order, and which shots to film first. For our prelim, we did everything in chronologically order but we had knowledge of situations when you would change this. We did most of our shots in our main task chronologically however there was some were we changed order as it was easier as it had the same set up. This helped us to plan our real shoot, saving us time changing set up all the time. 

Example of our Shot Logs

We also learnt how to use lights which also needed different set up so this was new but from our prelim experience we didn’t have much problems at all; being able to plan a shot plan to help minimise set ups.

I have learnt to be more organised, and deal with situations when things go wrong, keeping it moving smoothly. 

Post-production:
Editing our prelim task was beneficial for our final project as it not only familiarised us with how to use Adobe Premiere, but also reminded us of all the continuity rules and how important they are to produce a seamless narrative. The animation also helped us as we had placed the timing for each shot so it saved us time when actually coming to edit.  The editing of the prelim task was pretty basic, as all we needed to do was cut up the shots and place them in the right order; no particular editing techniques were needed or special effects or titles.

I think that was the main difference between the prelim and the main task: the new different editing techniques. I think I learnt a lot during the editing sessions of our final project, and I have progressed a lot in the use of different software. I now know how to use different colour grading tools in Adobe Premiere, and how to make titles using Live Type, although we had shown how to use it during our prelim but we never used it. We also learnt houw to use effects to make the film look more realistic. 

Teamwork:
The prelim task also further increased my confidence and teamwork skills, which was vital in our final project. I am new in this school so working with them in the prelim helped me realise how they worked and how to approach them. I came confident and expressed my ideas more so that we got the best ideas from everyone. We was able to learn how to split the work and get everything done on time. We saw how much effort each person had to put as it was a team effort.   We also found that if everyone did their task we could enjoy the task more, which I felt my group did, successfully making an opening sequence that we are all proud of.

Final production

I think we have made huge improvements from our test shoot, specially since special effects, grading and music has all been sorted and done. It really has come all together and I am very proud of my groups effort into this. There are obviously some improvements which can always be made, such as, the shoot of the man talking with the gun on his head; I find that shoot quiet flat on. there are few other improvements but overall i believe the opening sequence is ready.