Media Studies 3 - Chloe

The opening sequence to The Untouchables first shows moving black figures going across the screen, you are left thinking who or what are these figures, which makes these figures seem unknown to the audience.  The first scene is shot in a barber type place with Al Capone having a towel around his face, this also shows that he is unknown to the audience but is revealed when he takes his mask off, he is straight away seen as the big, tough one on the film as he has many bodyguards surrounding him, this scene is shot using a bird’s eye view. When one of the barbers cuts him you automatically think that he is going to be violent, this is the representation that you give to someone who is a boss or has many people working for him who also looks quite violent.  When we get outside you see everyone walking about the street, the camera moves in and focuses on a little girl holding onto a bucket.  She then walks into a bar where you see a man talking to the bartender and a guy in a pure white suit, he stands out in the scene as he is very bright, and this makes you think that he will have something to do with whatever happens next.  When he gets up and makes sure his briefcase is closed you know that there is something inside it, as he walks out the door, the director zooms out from the door of the bar so that you can see the whole bar and the people and cars around it.  When the bar blows up the director uses many camera angles such as, eye level, high angle, these are used so you can see the explosion all around.  The last part of the opening sequence is shot with all the cars trying to dodge the explosion, this shows that everyone is panicking around the bar whilst it is blowing up.  Watching this opening sequence gave our group a better understanding of the way an opening should be set out.  When watching this we began to think about the music and the camera shots and also the title sequence, also we began thinking what we could use for our own opening sequence.

Today in class we discussed what we had to do for the poster analysis part of the exam.  To do this we had to analyse the “Cloverfield” poster.  In this we had to answer questions on the medium, purposes, genre, fonts and technical and cultural codes.  We also learnt a little about anchorage in class, we analysed some posters which were examples of anchorage, such as Gladiator, American Beauty and Casablanca.  We learned that the type of font used on a poster can change the view that you take on the poster.  Such as on Casablanca the writing is red and looks to be handwritten this makes you think of connotations of blood, anger and romance, this allows you to have an insight into what the film is about.  Also in anchorage the music effects what the movie looks like as if you were to have a sad ending with fast beat music and it sounded lively then it wouldn’t be a typical sad ending whereas if you were to have slow music it would contribute to the sadness.