Research and Planning: Deconstruction of 'Road to Perdition'

Road to Perdition

The titles come in with a black background, before the film starts. I think this is done so you can read the titles before the film begins and not be distracted by titles instead of watching the film (if the titles overlap the opening). The titles fade in and out in white writing, and near the end of the titles, you hear the bridge sound of waves, before you see them. The clip starts with a tracking shot getting closer and closer to the boy standing by the sea, which makes you think that someone is coming up behind him.


The non-diegetic music that is playing at this point makes you unsure of what you think is going to happen because it isn’t tense, but it isn’t calm either. It makes you feel slightly on edge as it gives you a sense that something bad is going to happen. This is called foreboding, and I think the director used this because it makes you really think about whether someone bad is going to happen or not. The scene then fades out to white and shows another scene, which makes you think that it is showing you something that has happened in the past.


The next scene is set in a cold, snowy town that is set in the 1930’s, during the ‘Great Depression’. A tracking shot is used again at the side of the boy, whilst he is cycling through the busy town. You hear calm, peaceful, non-diegetic music which could make you believe that the film is going to be a happy one, or could lead you in the right direction of realising that it is going to be a thriller. This is because a lot of directors use contrapuntal sounds in order for the audience to think a lot about what is happening or going to happen. The fact that the music doesn’t fit with the clip is good, because it is more intriguing.

Research and Planning: Deconstruction of 'Strangers on a Train'

Link: Strangers on a Train Opening Sequence

Strangers on a Train
The opening scene starts off with a car driving into a train station with the camera panning whilst it goes past. You can tell that it is set in around the 1950’s/60’s era because it is in black and white, and the cars are so old fashioned. At the same time, you hear posh, old fashioned, non-diegetic music. The camera continues to pan whilst the man gets out of the car and walks into the train station. From the begging of the opening scene, until the very last second, the camera remains not showing any faces, just people’s legs and the backs of them when they walk away.


The scene in which the opening scene was set was a very busy place. This gives the audience the impression that it must be filmed at a train station because of the busyness, the small luggage, the announcements and the train tracks you see near the end of the opening scene. Normally, before you saw the train tracks, the audience would not know where the scene was set, but because of how they made it look and sound, the audience knew exactly where it was set. They used ‘point of view shot’ a few times in order for the audience to see what a certain character was seeing.


The music begins to get louder and louder and reaches a crescendo, which is the loudest part of a piece of music. This suggests that it is building up to something, and that something bad is going to happen. What I found really interesting was that there were no titles in the first minute and a half of the opening scene. Usually, the titles come straight away in the opening scene.

Research and Planning: Genre

The Genre We Have Chosen and Why

We have changed our minds about doing a 'horror film' for the main task. We have decided to do a 'psycological thriller' instead, because the ideas that we have fit more with that genre, rather than a horror film.We wanted to remain doing the same type of genre, a 'scary film', but thought that having our genre as 'psycological thriller' will allow us to use the ideas that we currently have.

Research and Planning: Genre

The Genre We Have Chosen and Why:

We have chosen to do a horror film for our main task. We have chosen to do this genre because we think we will be able to use a wide variety of camera shots, sound and mise-en-scene throughout our film. Doing a horror film will allows us to branch out and be able to show the different techniques that we have learnt.

Research and Planning: Brief

The Brief: The titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximun of two minutes.

Preliminary Task Evaluation

Media Studies – Preliminary Task Evaluation

The scene begins with a teenage girl who receives a text message from her friend which tells her to meet them somewhere. She goes to that place and unexpectedly, someone else comes to meet her who isn’t her friend. The body language that both characters give off makes it easy for the audience to see that they do not know each other, and the second characters’ entrance is completely unexpected. Throughout the scene, the camera is kept steady when necessary, until the end of the film when the effect of it not being steady is purposely used. The unsteadiness of the camera is used so that it shows what the teenage girl is seeing through a point of view shot when she looks up from the steps where she fell. The backgrounds of most shots are quite basic; the scenes shot inside the sports hall changing rooms are full of bags and clothes, but the continuity is not broken throughout because we did not move any objects. We did this so it would look completely realistic and nothing would distract the audience from the main part of the film. In the film, we used a wide variety of different camera shots, such as; long shot, wide shot, shot/reverse shot, over the shoulder shot and pan. I think that using various different shots shows good camera skills and it is also good practice for when we come to do the main assignments. At the beginning, when Rebecca walks into the changing room, the camera doesn’t keep up with her; therefore it distracts the audience and takes their focus away from the main character. I think that it was our weakest point in the film because it looks unprofessional. At 1:25 minutes, there is quite a long pause, which may give the audience the idea that they are not in a conversation and that each person was filmed at different times. This will also divert the audience’s attention onto thinking about that, rather than watching the film.

During the short film, there are lots of diegetic sounds, such as; the p.e class on the field, footsteps, the bang when the briefcase hits the wood, the text message tone, the door slam, shouting, speech and heavy breathing. Diegetic sounds are sounds that we hear from within the ‘film world’. These sounds are important in the film because generally, they are the most realistic. Whereas non-diegetic sounds are sounds that are added into the ‘film world’. We only used one non-diegetic sound, which was the tense music at the end when Rebecca is running away. The tense music we used was parallel sound because it was a sound that went with what is going on in the clip. There are some sounds in the film that we attempted to cut out, e.g. the shouting from the p.e class on the field because we felt that it was not needed in our film. Although we tried, we could not seem to separate that sound from the whole background sound and we didn’t want it to be dead silent in the background.

The lighting was very consistent throughout the film as everything was clear and you could see everything perfectly. The costumes the characters wore were ordinary because we wanted the film to look realistic of a teenage, sixth form girl at school. The second character that enters part of the way through the film also has plain clothing which consisted of a black top, a black cardigan, a black skirt and black tights. This character was meant to give off a suspicious vibe as she held a shiny silver briefcase in her hand and made no noise until she repeatedly said the phrase ‘you cannot run from us’.

Although the film was very short, we had to do a lot of editing. This was because of laughing, mistakes and generally messing up. We wanted to have text during the film introducing the actresses and the titles. We tried to have the text overlaying the film and although we tried many different things, we could not seem to do so, so we ended up just putting it in between two different shots. At the beginning of the film, we filmed Rebecca walking round the corner (after she gets the text message), and we then switched to another shot of her walking up to the door. We noticed that you could see that she had stopped and then started walking again in the second shot; therefore we thought it looked unrealistic so we cut out about 1 second so that it looked like it followed on from the last shot. Throughout the film, we wanted every shot change to look as natural as possible and I think that with the achieved this with the editing that we did. As I mentioned earlier, there was quite a long pause at 1:25 minutes which could have been sorted out with editing by cutting some of the time, but I don’t think any of my group noticed before we had finished it.

Final Preliminary Task Video