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American Beauty opening sequence analysis.

In this opening sequence, it starts by showing an establishing shot of a small suburban town from a helicopter. it slowly zooms in on one house. it then cuts to a middle aged man laying in bed with his alarm ringing. he turns off the alarm and rolls over onto his back, sighs and lies still. it shows him stepping out of bed into his slippers. it then cuts to a shot of him "jerking off" in the shower.
After this it shows a rose and a lady cutting the rose. it introduces this as his wife and also introduces his gay neighbours Jim and Jim. his wife and neighbours start talking with each other. it then shows his teenage daughter. whilst he is walking to his car his briefcase falls open and everything in it falls out.

STOW Analysis.

Strengths
one strength of our treatment was that we had a good story line which fitted in with the conventions of the genre. for example there is a lot of mystery and suspense which is a main part of thriller movies. it was also good as it is very character driven and would be interesting and will not require any special effects.

Weakness
A weakness of our treatment was that our opening sequence did not match the rest of the movie. the teacher said that it was too fast paced and we had tried too much to fit all the conventions of this genre into an opening sequence.

Opportunity
an opportunity is that because our plot is character driven we do not need to add any special effects etc. also it is following the life of one main character so we would only need once actor.

Threat
A threat is that we may no be able to find a middle aged actor who is available at the times we need.

Treatment feedback

Today my group pitched our idea for our movie opening sequence to the rest of the class and the teachers. After we had finished the pitch we got feedback from the teachers about aspects we need to change or improve.

The teachers said that the plot we had written was brilliant for the thriller genre and matched the conventions for the genre. However we were told that our opening didn't match our plot as it was too fast paced and therefore we were told to re-think our opening scene. they suggested that we slow it down and use it to show how mundane his life is such as films like american beauty. we were also told to watch the movie 'lost in translation' so today we will go away and watch the movie and get more ideas for our opening sequence.

Prelim Evaluation

The brief of our prelim was to create a 30 second clip featuring one person opening a door, walking across a room and then having a conversation with another person. The video had to feature shot/reverse shot, match on action and 180° rule. We matched the criteria of the blog and included everything we had to. 

Prelim Task