Box Office

      The genre of our film is dance. Dance films have been popular since the 70s when the film ‘Saturday night fever’ was released in 1997 earning a worldwide lifetime gross of $237,113,184. In 2006 the film ‘Step up’ with a production budget of $12 million made $20,659,573 in its opening weekend and worldwide gross of $114,194,847 in 2,647 theatres. The film was such a success Buena Vista made a sequel in 2008 ‘Step up 2 the streets’ bringing in $18,908,826 in its opening weekend and a worldwide gross of $148,172,291 at 2,528 theatres. In 2008 Buena Vista also made the dance musical ‘High school Musical 3’ with a production budget of $11 million, it was released in 3,626 theatres with a worldwide gross of $223,871,675. The genre is popular at the moment, with two of the most popular films of the year 'Step up 2' and 'High School Musical 3' being dance.

Preliminary Task

To give us camera experience before we begin to shoot our actual project we did a preliminary task. This involved filming a conversation between 2 or more people. We had to include someone walking through a door and shots from a variety of angles. Though the story of this short clip is somewhat insignificant, it is the filming from different angles, keeping to the 180 degree rule and the continuity of the piece that we focussed on.

The good aspects of our film was the continuity throughout, all the scenes flowed smoothly together also.  Even though the acting was not a focal point we still got the main angle shots into the clip. With all the smoothly flowing scenes and the angles which had been shot it made the clip short but aesthetically pleasing to the voyeurs.

However, the sound in some parts of the short film were barely audible. This may have caused confusion over the story line as some vital speech could not be heard. Though only a short film, the story could have been slightly more complex and interesting. This would have been accomplished if we had created a more unusual situation to shoot.

Atmosperic Music for Piece

From researching films of the dance genre i have found that they often use a fusion of music as well as a fusion of dance styles. While thinking about the music we could stage our opening sequence to, I have come up with the idea of mixing classical and hip hop music. Here is one example -

Step Up - Opening Sequence

I think that the mood of these two music pieces would work well with the overall idea of our opening-

Scala - Palladio

T-Pain - Church

Research

As a group we have researched the opening sequences of teenage/dance genre films to help inspire ideas for our work. We have looked at multiple openings that included elements we would like to use or consider using in our own opening of a film. Links to the sequences that have inspired us most are listed below.

Step Up - opening sequence

Footloose - opening sequence

C Block En Pointe Amber

The target audience for En Pointe will be people who have an interest in dance & also if they are dancers themselves as this film is based on dance.

The film could also have an interest from non-dancers because of the title as the language used is french. From using a french title it gives a feeling of interest as it doesn't give away the content of the film. The age which will have an interest in the film will be teenagers and upwards.

The gender will be of a mixed selection. It will mainly intrigue female viewers as females will be dancing in the film.

Our film is still giving the audience the same but different because it isn't a typical dance love story for example "Dirty Dancing" where through dance the two characters fall in love.

Defining an opening sequence

An opening sequence is the first scene of a film and the audience decide their initial impression on the film from the opening scene, so it should:

1. Establish place and time
2. Reassure the audience by demonstrating the conventions of the chosen genre
3. Setting up audience expectations
4. Introducing and establishing characters
5. Setting up enigmas
6. Set up the initial equilibrium, to be disrupted later
7. Introduce any theme and motifs linked to the ideologies in the film

We intend to cover every one of these aspects, but will focus on introducing genre and theme.