Genre opening

In class, we were given the task of creating the opening to a certain type of genre film. Mr Cole (our teacher) split us up into four different groups and gave each group a different genre to work with. Out of action, horror, romance/tearjerker and documentary/mockumentary, my group (consisting of myself, Lizzie, Aimee and Hugh) were given the genre of documentary/mockumentary. In our group, we had rather a long brainstorm trying to decide what to do. Beings we only had an hour to shoot the opening, i kept looking at the clock and watching time pass by as we brainstormed. We kept trying to to think of a decent idea but none came until Mr cole told us about a group of year 13s who had created a mockumentary about a boy with a bizarre attachment to a chair and that nudged us towards the idea of our tree hugging mockumentary. Beings that this was the only decent idea we'd had in our thinking session, we rushed outside to film some nature shots and have someone running up to a tree and hugging it.

We tried to recruit actors but nobody wanted to hug a tree. Lizzie, very kindly and quite reluctantly, said she would act as the tree hugger. With myself directing, Aimee filming and Lizzie acting, we got to work filming shots around the quad - an area of our school with a few trees and lots of plants to create the natural scene we were aiming for. We managed to go upstairs and get a low angle establishing shot of the quad but due to the fact that we had to shoot through a window, the window bars came into the shot when we zoomed out. When editing, myself and Lizzie tried to use as much of this shot as we could. After we got a lot of nature shots and a lot of shots of Lizzie hugging trees, we went up to the Geography department to see if one of the teachers would be kind enough to be in our video. At first we asked Mr Harrison but he really didn't want to be videoed. We were starting to run out of time but then we found Miss Freaney in the Geography office and she agreed to be in our video. I was surprised at how well Miss Freaney acted for us and I can only say thanks to her.

When it came to editing, one hour wasn't enough and Lizzie and I (I think Aimee decided to work on a separate cut) used some of our free periods to edit our footage together. We decided on a sequence of the footage before we edited anything and came up with a title which we put at the end of our clip so that the viewer gets the feel that it is the introduction for a longer mockumentary. I bought in a small array of instrumental music that I thought could work in our video and we ended up using three different songs. If we were to publish this video outside of educational purposes, we would need to abide by copyright laws for the first song we used: 'Comptine d'un autre été: L'après-midi' by Yann Tiersen. This song is from the film 'Amélie' and I think that it is a beautiful piece of piano music. The other two tracks were royalty-free tracks courtesy of YouTube users 'tritonas01' and 'royaltyfreetracks'.

I am quite happy with the way this mockumentary turned out although I think that the music transitions aren't as smooth as they could be. Other than that, I think it's turned out rather well. See it below!