BFI Course

On Wednesday - which definitely should've been a snow day - we all plodded up to Southbank together, to watch a course in the BFI centre on how to make the opening of a movie.

DANIEL KLEINMAN
Once we'd finally arrived, we were introduced to Daniel Kleinman - now known as a commercials director - who actually uses the Final Cut software at home! He'd previously created the opening titles for some of the Bond series, continuously from GoldenEye to Casino Royale. He was very interesting to listen to and answered every question with detail; I loved the fact that some of his ideas and graphics he used had depth to them which was left for the audience to depict.

Here's just one of his many famous commericals..
The thought that this was banned makes it even more inspiring!



COLIN GOUDIE
We also heard from editor Colin Goudie - a clearly eccentric editor who is devoted to his profession. He informed us of the making of his new film Monsters; it was quite comforting to hear that many of the scenes they filmed were shot out of the blue and not really planned at all! It was also quite thought provoking to find out that the filming crew consisted of only four people - it just proves exactly what can be achieved with such a small group..

Here's the trailer to the new movie Monsters, edited by Goudie..



"HELLO? IS ANYBOY OUT THERE?"
For the remaining time of the course, we were entertained using some examples of previous A-Level Media film openings. They helped us by identifying the points of film openings which need to be focused on and which need to be avoided.. My favourite example being The Premonition by Chris Adams and Josh - if anyone can find that video, please send it to me! For some reason, the more profoundly weak openings seemed to include Bristol accents.. Wondering if there's any connections?

Here's a little archive of the day filmed by Heather on her pretty iPhone - I think the state of me (and my 'Reading tent') reflects the general mood at the beginning of the day provoked by the weather conditions..



I still deny any accusations that the snowball attacking Miss Routledge was thrown by me.