Risk Assessment

Risk Assessment

Film Censorship

Please click onto the powerpoint presentation below: History of British Film Censorship

Equipment List

Equipment List

Film production and distribution research

Dreamworks Studios

DreamWorks was founded 12 October, 1994DreamWorks was founded 12 October, 1994 in Universal City, California. DreamWorks has three founders; Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenburg and David Geffen. DreamWorks has six current divisions: DreamWorks Animation, DreamWorks Live Theatrical Productions, DreamWorks Movie Networks, DWKids.com, DreamWorks Television and DreamWorks Home Entertainment. DreamWorks both produce and distribute films, and produced three Oscar winning films: American Beauty, Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind. DreamWorks highest grossing film is currently Transformers: Dark Side Of The Moon. DreamWorks are famed for releasing family/animation films.

20^th Century Fox

Joseph Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck founded 20^th Century Fox May 31st, 1935. It is currently situated in the Century City area of Los Angeles. 20th Century Fox is a subsidiary of News Corporation, owned by Rupert Murdoch. 20th Century Fox also produces and distributes films. They have an association with producing and distributing sci-fi films. They produced Avatar and Star Wars. Avatar was 20th Century Fox's highest grossing film and also the highest grossing film of all time. 

Working Title

Two producers founded working Title: Tim Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe.  The headquarters of Working Title are located in London, United Kingdom. Working title is a subsidiary of Universal that produces films mainly in the UK. Working Title is mainly focused on production but also distributes, they are renowned for producing light-hearted comedies. Their highest grossing film is Bridget Jones’ Diary, making over 280 million pounds.

Universal Studios

Carl Laemmie, Pat Powers, Mark Dintenfass, William Swanson, David Horsley, Adam Kessel, Charles Baumann and Jules Brulatour founded Universal Pictures on the 30th April 1912. The headquarters of Universal Studios are located in Universal City, California. Universal Studios are a division of NBCUniversal and a subsidiary of Comcast. Universal is a production and distribution companies that focuses on producing comedies and establishes franchises from films.

Lionsgate Films

Lionsgate was founded in Vancouver, British Columbia on January 12, 1998 and now headquartered Santa Monica, California, United States.  Lionsgate’s founder is Frank Giustra. Lionsgate is a distributing company. They began a trend of distributing films that were deemed too controversial for other American institutes. The studio’s highest grossing film was The Hunger Games. Lionsgate is also famed for rarely co-producing films with other major studios.

Mean Streets (1973) — Art of the Title

To view the opening title sequence of Mean Streets; please click the link below:
Mean Streets (1973) — Art of the Title

The film begins with the logo and name of the production company, which is in this particular film, was the parent company of Warner Bros. Pictures and Warner Music Group; Warner Communications company. As the production company allows films to change the colour of the background and the logo itself to relate to the film. Therefore; the hue bright red connotes blood, love and rage, whereas, this deeper, darker red connotes power and lust.

The opening title sequence begins with a voice over from the director; Martin Scorsese. This technical code helps to illustrate the tone of film and the major themes. Scorsese begins with "You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home", this reveals to the audience that religion and life on the "streets" conflict with each other and that the protagonist will experience some form of moral dilemma. The life on the streets itself connotes danger, possible gangster/mafia activity and the character's association with a mafia, or, possibly him trying to escape from the mafia.

Scorsese uses diegetic sound of the protagonist, Charlie, shuffling through his bedroom. The use of diegetic gives the film verismilitude and the sound of police sirens tells the audience Charlie lives in an area where crime is frequent and the police patrol the streets; this relates back to the title Mean Streets. Charlie's blase attitude to the police sirens shows that Charlie is accustomed to the noise of sirens.

Scorsese uses match-on-action of Charlie lying in bed and resting his bed on a pillow. However the cutting between shots is delayed by 0.5 seconds so it gives the sequence a feel of repetition of Charlie resting his head on a pillow, but between every cut on the match-on-action closes in on Charlie's face, moving from a close-up to an XCU.

Scorsese then uses The Ronettes - Be My Baby as a sound bridge to the actual title opening sequence
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-0upHlWfQ4

The production teams credits are overlaid in front of a film projector, this is clever as the object (projector) is commonly associated with the roles of the director and producers.

This image below names the production company (distributors). It also informs the public and other production companies that the rights to this film (art); Mean Streets are exclusively's Warner Bros. Studios. The cinematographer used a grainy yellow/green filter so it appears this sequence was actually shown from a projector, but also it makes the image of the streets look dirty, again tying the image back to the title. It also helps set the location for the audience, as they can now clearly see the film was hot in New York. The text for the title of Mean Streets is placed over the image in bright red emphasizing the genre of the film.

In regards to crediting the actors, the names are placed around the action taking place. This shows the resourcefulness of the editing team as they understood the limitations of a film projector (the action may not fill the whole screen, so you're left with darkness around the shots) and turned the limitations into advantages.

Genre of The Title Sequence

As a group, Fatima, Tanisha, Indiya and I decided the genre of our opening title sequence will be a romantic comedy. I feel this genre is actually more challenging than perhaps, thrillers. This is due to there is more creative freedom in a thriller, but I like a challenge also. We had to investigate the conventions of our chosen film genre so I made a presentation below, stating some of the main features that occur in romantic comedies. Despite the fact we should aim to stick to certain conventions to make our film easily recognisable to the audience, hopefully we can break one or two film conventions.

Here is the presentation:

Romantic Comedy Title Sequence on Prezi

Character Profile