Comparing students and professionals

In class on Wednesday, we looked at film openings, as this is what we shall be doing for our practical coursework. We needed to understand how important the opening few minutes of a film are. They can give away everything or can build suspense. The main things that we would have to focus on when making our film openings are: originality, creativity, performance, professionalism and intrigue. To make us more aware of the importance of these aspects, we watched some film openings that students have done and some film openings done by professional directors and we compared their styles.

A still from 'BROKEN'

‘BROKEN’ was the name of the first student project that we looked at. While it was intriguing, creativity, originality, performance and professionalism were seriously lacking. The film opening starts with a boy crying in his room with soft piano music in the background. It then cuts randomly to a street chase with a wobbly camera and two completely different people. These two characters proceed to try and beat each other up while somersaulting off walls – clearly an attempt by the film-maker to show off his friends and when the fight ends, there are opening credits with a voice over that cannot be heard due to the music playing too loudly. The film opening ends with a gang outside the crying boy’s house. This opening is all over the place with no clear plot or sense of what is going to happen. Characters are not built and setting is not clear either.

A still from 'Basis & Foundations'

In ‘Basis & Foundations’ – another student project, it starts with a boy who looks about seventeen in bed. We then see a wobbly camera shot of his profile although it is clear that the film-maker has a tripod as we then see it in the next shot up against the wall as the teen walks past. The teen then picks up a gun that is just lying in clear view on a desk and then to the bed where he picks up his wallet. A close up of an ID in the wallet shows that the character was born in February 1974, making him thirty-seven years old. The main character clearly isn’t. The main character then walks into the kitchen where we see a fridge full of magnets. When he shuts the fridge door after getting out some juice, all the magnets are gone and a picture of a girl has ‘magically’ appeared on the fridge door. An appallingly acted gun threat scene is next, shot outside the main character’s house. In a badly positioned over shoulder shot, you can see an old man on the other side of the road laying a path in his front garden, ‘totally oblivious’ to the fact that the main character shoots the person he’s talking to. While a plot is clear in this film opening, performance isn’t fantastic and professionalism is lacking.



Mathew Broderick breaking the fourth wall as Ferris Bueller



Comparing those two with professional films makes them look even less creative and original. In class we looked at the opening of ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ (dir. John Hughes)  – one of my favourite films. The first shot you see of a person, after the shot of the front of the Bueller household, is a close up shot of Ferris (Mathew Broderick) looking ill, lying in bed. We are immediately introduced to Ferris, his parents and his sister Janie who has an attitude problem and feels like her parents love Ferris more than her. So immediately, characters are built up and the audience are aware that this is an average American family living in a suburban neighbourhood. We also learn that Ferris’ mum is an estate agent and while we are unsure at this point where Ferris’ dad works, we know that he works away from home. Once Ferris’ parents leave his room, we see Ferris talking to the camera as if the audience were right there with him this technique of filming that John Hughes decided to adopt for this movie is known as ‘breaking the fourth wall’. The fourth wall is basically an invisible wall that stops the character in the film from ‘seeing’ the audience and so they are unaware of their presence and therefore do not engage with them. When you break the fourth wall, the audience become ‘visible’ to the character and so they engage with them. This is rarely used but other examples of film where they break the fourth wall are: Pierrot le Fou (dir. Jean-Luc Godard), Wanted (dir. Timur Bekmambetov) and Wayne’s World (dir. Penelope Spheeris) I think that using the technique of breaking the fourth wall can be very effective and is something that I would like to think about when planning for my film opening. Below is a clip from the film 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off', in it are several examples of breaking the fourth wall.