Rough-cut copy

Edited 30/03/2017: Sounds and Music

My piece, although a gritty British gangster film, works on building tension. With a hostage scene being the main basis of the opening, we want a suspense to build and then plateux. This music has a slow build up. It starts fairly quite and slow, building up to a point where the volume, intensity and speed increase simultaneously. This build up creates the suspense we are looking for and with a narration over the top, hopefully we can capture the thriller aspect of the opening and furthermore keep our audience "on the edge of their seats". 

Most of the opening will be dominated by music and dialogue or narration. We, however want some sounds for specific things. 

For example we want a light flicker to sound in the hostage scene when the lights turn on. This against the silence should give it an eeriness and should forebode a certainly bad ending. It is simple and can be used as a transition from light to dark. The flickering fizzing of the light is unsettling and connotes a sense of malfunction and disposition is society again promoting this idea of turning to crime. This sound is used in a similar way in Stranger Things. Although it is used to convey a supernatural ambience, it also creates an unsettling tension,

Also for the opening, homeless shot, I want the diegetic sound of traffic to overwhelm everything else and thus overwhelm the conversation happening between the two characters. This shows that the traffic and the life of the streets is stronger than their relationship. The life of the streets is the thing that breaks their relationship in the end. They use this effectively in the opening of Shaft. It's used to establish the location and here we are able to do that.

Sound is fairly crucial in films. For example in Alice Creed, they have a fairly menacing, slow paced soundtrack that emphasises their own menacing ways. The soundtrack leaves the audience feeling ill-knowledgeable about where the scene is going. The soundtrack juxtaposes the things they are doing. The silence of diegetic sounds makes it more eerie and develops a larger contrast between the cynicism projected form the action and the contrasting music, thus making the audience feel out of place, just like the music.

Layer Cake also use sound effectively. The mood of Layer Cake is much less anticipated and much more light-hearted in the sense that it's more about a group of men selling cocaine rather than kidnapping a girl. Therefore the music is a lot more pop-like and is more apt for the mood. Also they use a narration, in which Daniel Craig talks over all of the action happening in the opening. They use it to introduce characters and introduce the plot. It's effective as it's a simple yet professional way of easily establishing the complications of the story. Within the opening there's various uses of diegetic sounds to establish the setting. For example when you hear the police sirens, it suggests that you are now in a crime-ridden area. The director also uses synchronised sound to link the story and the narration together. When they go to the jail whilst panning through the different story lines, one of the characters finishes Daniel Craig's non-diegetic narration with a diegeitc sentence.

Fonts

Fonts are key as they introduce a theme into your opening. They introduce your film essentially. If they don't follow the same mood as the film opening then they fail to establish your film. Therefore we are looking to create a British gangster grittiness atmosphere through the use of a criminal looking font. We quite liked the idea of having the titles on a black screen, breaking up the shots- similar to how Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels uses this effect.

Lock Stock opening title

I liked the look of this font as it is the same font as a reg. number on a car. This gives connotations of stealing cars or doing illegal acts of injustice using cars. The fact that cars are on roads and the lives of these people revolve around the work they do on the streets, makes this font establish a surreptitious connection. Visually the letters look robust but quite parodical in the sense that we are using a font typically associated with cars and the legality of owning a car; this plays on the immorality of the characters and also gives it a hint of dark comedy in the opening, alike to many British gangster films.

This font, indifferent to the previous font also shows a dark realism to the cynicism of a modern gangster society. However this font gives off more of a dark, hard feel to it. The letters, aesthetically suggest a violent and aggressive notion which may come from the characters; effectively initiating a dark undertone for the piece to follow. The letters almost look spray painted in their effect- this emphasises the illegal acts that are to follow by linking the opening to the illegal act of defacing property: in essence, defacing our opening.

Our last choice has more of an order and discipline to it, however it connotes, more so than the others, this idea of aggression and intimidation. The font has links to the military. The law and order of the army juxtaposes the immorality and cynicism of the characters but in some sense suggests that this gang of men work like the army and share and promote a superiority through terror and power. In contrast it also shows a corruption through this power; the juxtaposition of the two creates an ominous sense of immorality. I would like the title to be revealed as though it was done on a type writer or in a similar fashion where the letters appear one by one.