Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) - Opening Sequence

The opening two minutes for my films have ben heavily influenced by the first scenes from British rom-com Four Weddings and a Funeral, directed by Mike Newell. The film falls in the same genre as my film and so is a good example of how my film has been influenced by similar films. The opening of the film shows a number of charcters preparing for a wedding, this is similar as the characters in my film are preparing for a wedding rehearsal. Four Weddings also has a soundtrack playing throughout the opening however there is no dialogue unlike in my film in which the music is faded in order for the dialogue to be heard. The song I have used is also of a much faster pace and less traditional which will hopefully create a contrat to the feel that the audience recieves watching the opening to Four Weddings and a Funeral. Another similarity is that the credits appear as part of the shots rather than in seperate frames which I aim to replicate with my film, however some actors names appear before the first frame which contrasts to my film in which any credits will appear as part of the first shots. The film also includes close ups of different objects such as the alarm clock and the saucepan, this is reflected in my film with the close up of the keys on the hall table as they are picked up by one of the characters.

Preliminary Film

We set our preliminry film in a cafe with the narrative of a man asking his friend to be the best man at his wedding.
Dialogue:
Man 1: (on the phone) "I'll be there in a bit"
(In a cafe)
Man 2 : "I've got something to ask you"
Man 1: "Course mate, ask me anything"
Man 2: "Well basically..."
Waitress: (walks over) "Can I get you anything?"
Man 1: "I'll have a coffee"
Man 2: "I'm fine thanks, (waitress walks away) so anyway, as I was saying. You know I'm getting married in July? Well I want you to be my best man"
Man 1: "Of course I will".

Editing

This week we have begun editing what will be the final version of our opening scene. The shots that we originally filmed came to around 3 and a half minutes however we have been able to cut this down in order to make the film more fast paced and to the point. We have found the editing software (Sony Vegas) fairly easy to get on with despite initial problems with getting our film to play and hearing the soundtrack to our film. However these problems were solved by rendering the film to allow it to play as one and by moving the edited files to a computer with a working sound system in order to be able to import the song we have chosen (These Love Songs Don't Make Sense - The Vindickers) and edit the sound that already appears in the film. At the moment we have cut all of our footage together using cuts and fades to show our ability to use a range of different editing techniques. We have also put the soundtrack in and have established how to fade it out at the appropriate moment to go into first main scene in our film. We now need to work on editing the volume of the track in order to get the full effect if the dialogue in the very first scenes and need to decide on the font we are intending to use for the titles in our film. We will do this using dafont.com, a site which allows you to download more interesting and creative fonts than those available on conventional media software.