Research of opening scene by Joe

For my opening scene I have decided to evaluate the first five minutes of Running Scared (2006) produced by Media 8 entertainment. The Film follows a drug deal that has taken a turn for the worst, Joey Gazelle (Paul Waler) is instructed to disposing a gun that was used to shoot a dirty cop. Things start to get even worse for Joey as the neighbour's child Olek steals the hidden gun and uses it to shoot his abusive father. Joey needs to get the gun back before the police find the kid.

The Film begins with the prduction companies, Media 8 ent, New Line cinema being shown on the underside of car tyres.upbeat music plays while the titles roll, the titles are stopped by the diegetic sound of a gunshot where we get our first shot of the characters . We see an establishing shot of both Joey and a young boy, Olek being held in his arms wearing a blood stained shirt. We are led to believe that the boy had been shot and is dying. During the two mens frantic dash for their car, contrapuntal, soft and calm music is playing. As the car starts to drive we see repeated amounts of fast cuts to give the impression of speed. We are given many clues as to Joey's job and where he lives, we see close-up shots of a gun and New Jersey licence plates. At 1:06 there is a great shot of the car's reflection in the traffic lights, the camera then tracks downwards from the reflection and is then linked up to a long shot of the men in the car.

We see the titles "Running scared" which is a cartoon-like close up. The camera zooms out of the graffitied title and we come to a window 18 hours in the past. This scene consists of a drug deal which quickly turns violent as a group of 3 masked men break in and start to hyjack the drug deal. After the worst of the shooting is done, Joey and his mob find out that the 3 masked men were actually dirty cops. Joey's mob scramble for their car and make a quick getaway, as the men are driving away from the scene of the crime Joey is told to "take the piece(gun)." He is then told "Don't F**k this up, your head is on the line here." This car scene is very similar to our own car scene.
I have chosen this film as there are a few scenes that are very similar to ours, like the car scene and a drug deal gone bad. The use of shots during the car scene are mainly close ups of reactions like eyes and weapons like guns and baseball bats. We tried to incorporate some of the shots that this film had used like a close up of the eyes in the rear view mirror.

Joe.

Poster

 I have chosen this to analyse this extract from  'In Too Deep' which was shown in 1999. It is about an An undercover cop goes too deep into the Cincinnati drug trade. The local drug lord, a man who calls himself God, controls all of the action in Ohio. As the cop moves up the ladder, he befriends the gangster, learns of his violent tendencies, but also sees him as a benefactor to the poor, a dedicated family man, and one who staunchly defends his friends. The cop's commanding officer fears that he has become too close to the gangster and will be unable to regain his identity, a fear that comes close to reality when the big bust ultimately happens. I have chosen this poster as it relates to our project theme of 'drugs and crime'. The concept of a 'local drug lord' which relates to our film. The undercover cop in a way relates to our film as david the main protagonist comes out of the police station on bail. The link below is a scene when they test the main protgonist to aim and fire at a 'snake' in the neighborhood . This links up to the   


Zaq

Friday Afternoon

Our aim for today is to carry on editing and make our film looking better. We appericaited our class members feedbacks yesterday which is allowing us to work more in depth on the negative feedback to make it look better.

Zaq

Research into production companies by Joe

I felt that as a gangster/urban film that Cipher Films would be a great production company to work with as they have produced films that are similar to our own such as "Kidulthood" and "Adulthood". I also thought that either Cipher Films or Columbia Pictures would be perfect for us as Columbia Pictures have helped to produce many of the Guy Ritchie films such as "Snatch" and "Lock stock" these films are also similar to ours and their experiance in this genre could help us out.

Joe.

Re shooting the final scene

As we have filmed on two different cameras, one being full HD and using a mini SD card and the other being non-HD and using a mini DV tape we can't connect the two onto the same film. This means we will have to re shoot the final "Sundown" scene. There were a few problems with the things we had filmed on the mini DV tapes aswell with the sound quality being not as good as the other clips.

Joe.

Editing "Sundown"

Another day in class and another day of editing. David, who has been doing a very good job so far at editing has continued again. Today we spent the lesson trying to action match the two different car shots, this is harder than it sounds as we wanted the shots to jump between one another but for the audio to be one consistant sound. However we came up with a few problems with timing the speech to peoples mouths moving in shot.


Joe.

Second day back

Another day back in college, unfortunately Zaq has to be on an art trip, so it's up to David and myself to get down to work without Zaq's assistance. We spent the lesson thinning the clips down again to the bare minimum amount that we need. We had a little trouble uploading the clips today as the "P" drive went down for most of the lesson.

David and Joe.