Preliminary Research

Before selecting genre, I decided to research on different genres.

Film	Genre/Genre Conventions	How did this scene introduce characters, settings and create intrigue?	What did you like/dislike about the intro?
Extraction 2, 2023	Action Fight, Explosion, Winner, Buildings	This scene gives an introduction of who the main character might be. This can indicate as a Hero, because he was sent for help which makes him look important and useful. This scene also gives the overview of the genre, as it includes conventions such as guns, wars, and explosions. This tells readers that there's more war to come and he will be our “hero”.	There's no absolute way that Chirs Hemsworth, a very well-known actor, would just simply be used in the begging scene to be dead. So it's obvious to people that he would be alive again. This also does not make the surprising feeling which does not bring viewers attention to continue watching.
Pamalia: The Corpse Village, 2023	Horror Blood, Jumpscare, Dark, Death	The scene introduces the plot of the overall movie. It also shows the genre, it being horror. Because of all the conventions such as blood, graveyards and nighttime, it proves that the scene is a horrified genre.	No dialogue which makes it boring to watch. It's an Indonesian film, which in my opinion, is the worst country to produce films.
Uglies, 2024	Sci Fi Unrealistic, Technology, Aliens, Science	The opening scene introduces the plot of the overall film. It mentions that people over 16 get operations to avoid conflict about pollution. Then the movie introduces the overall plot of some people, the “uglies” , who are able to perform this operation. Overall it gives the genre reveal and the plot.  Additionally, this also gives an effect of a subverted genre. Mainly towards it being something the opposite of what they had in the opening scene.	It sounds so foolish and it tries to make people relate to it but it actually makes people cringe. “Not being pretty enough” is not what we want to watch as an audience of this generation. It basically sounds like “pick me”. The casting is bad, it's embarrassing.
(500) days of Summer, 2009	Romance  Love, Breakups, Red, Relationship	The scene introduces the characters before they actually meet each other. So, the scene includes an introduction of the characters' names, and small memorial shots of them as a young kid. The narrator also includes a small detail of whats the movie about “This is not a love story”, this tells audiences that their relationship might be more than a “love story”.	I hate the fact that the narrator mentioned that it wasn't a love story because then it means it has a bad ending. The idea of putting videos of them as a child was so cute and smart.
Johnny English, 2003	Comedy  Jokes, Funny, Family, Joyful	The scene introduces the Hero. I think so because there was a short conversation asking for an agent. Agents are usually used to represent Heros in a concept of helping someone's mission.	I like the movie because it already looks funny from the daydream of Johnny. But I’m disappointed because the opening scene basically tells the audience what most things might happen, “saving the day as an undercover agent..”

Heres a youtube link that my teacher gave me to understand about opening scenes.

In this video, Ive learned many ways to open a film. I like the idea of introducing the plot in the opening scene because it gives audience information of what the movie is about. This can provide loyalty to consumers to avoid having to watch the whole movie. Using this way to open a scene can tell audience what they are going to watch about. I like this because I don't like the idea of waiting till the end to view the plot.

Reflection: We did this section in term 1 before we actually started learning about opening scenes and creating our blogs. This was very easy to make because all we needed to do was just copy and paste for the notes we took and all we needed to do was to create the reflection. Overall I have no issues in this blog, besides the fact that it only has a view information that I can use for ideas and references. 

Weekly Progress + Plan

This is the weekly progress + plan for my opening scene project.

Week	Start Date		Task		Blogpost Title	Content	Deadline
W1	30 September	Pre Production	Research	1	Brief
				2	Team
				3	Weekly Progress
				4	Preliminary Research	Broad genre research	W3
W2	7 October		Research	5	Research: Industry	Who makes music videos?	W3
W3	14 October		Research	6	Research: Genre	Codes and Conventions of your genre	W4
W4	21 October		Plan	7	Statement of Intent	Your initial proposal	W5
W5	28 October		Plan	8	Storyboard	Shot by shot plan	W7
				9	Script / Screenplay		W7
							W7
W6	4 November		Plan	10	Screen Test	Actor auditions	W7
				11	Classwork	How to: Camera, MeS, Sound, Edit	W7
							W7
W7	11 November		Plan	12	Location scout & Risk Assessment		W7
				14	Filming Schedule	Film over the break?	W7
							W7

This is my Term 2 Weekly Progress

Week 1

Throughout the week, we learned about Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the media world. We also then started working on our blogs for our opening scene project.

For this project, I'm very excited to work on it because we are going to do a unique and easy technique for our opening scene. But, I'm not really excited with the research because our teacher decided to add more things to research about such as Production, Distribution, and the Exhibition for our project media.

Week 2

In this week, we've started to do our research for out opening scene project. Our research was about the industry and researching on companies that produce and distribute similar text that we will be doing for our project (horror, found footage).

Throughout the research, I was still very lazy to finish the first part. Not even closely done, we have another research which is twice as much as the first one that we have done. I'm gonna be so tired and I'm gonna procrastinate most of my time but I'll try my best to keep up with my work before the submission date.

Week 3

We are given a new set of research to do which was about genre. This research helps us understand more about our genre and help us find ideas on what to us and what to make for our project. This research took me about 2 weeks to finish, but i managed to submit and completed it on time. Even though it was exhausted, this research was quite fun and very helpful for inspiration for my project. We also learned about two type of integration which included horizontal and vertical.

Week 4

In this week, we decided to start making our statement of intent. This basically helps us guide our target audiences, our overall ideas for our project. This was easy but there might need to be changes as we always have new ideas coming after we would finish idea sharing. We also learn another genre theory which included synergy, hypodermic needle, two step flow, and uses & gratification which was found by Blumler & Katz. 

Week 5

In this week, we have started to work on our project. We started learning about creating storyboards, creating scripts and what is screenplays. We have also managed to start working on our plots and what we want to use in our footage to make it easier for us to film and write. We also had a unit assessment about media consolidation. We had an issue during the test, so I would consider myself doing really bad, because I didn't really studied. But overall I passed the test.

Week 6

In this week, all we did was finish up our project blogs which included the storyboard, script writing and screen play. Our teacher also decided to mention the due dates for our project which will be on Wednesday 13th. The due date includes the blogs about research, storyboard, script, statement of intent. Overall we haven't really learned anything new but we've managed to get our project's storyline done, making it easy fr us to complete other task.

Week 7

This was the week where we had to prepare ourselves for our media semestral exams. We also had to submit our blogs by today and I'm glad that we managed to complete the task on time. Even though there was struggles with the storyboard and script writing, the finish results satisfied me. Overall, we had to learn about media studies exams about text analysis and we had to finish up our blogs when we had free time.

Reflection: Making this was easy because all we had to do was to summarise what we did in class. In some cases, we'll mostly forget because our teacher would either ask us to make it before the week ends or if our teacher would ask the week after. Which sometimes we would forget what we've been doing making it challenging sometimes. Overall, it wasn't that hard because we could share our memories together as a group and telling each other what we've learnt and what to put in our weekly blog summary.

This is my Term 3 Weekly Progress

W8	8 January	Production	Shoot		Editing Mini Project	A short recreation of a scene from your genre	W10
					Behind the scenes	Images of your filming shoot	W10
					Filming Schedule
W9	15 January		Shoot		File Organisation	My system of storing video files
W10	22 January	Post-Production	Editing		Editing Process	A description (including screen shots) of how you edited your post	W12
W11	29 January		Editing		Audience Feedback	A review from your target audience	W12
W12	5 February		Editing
W13	12 February		Self Reflection		Self Reflection: CCR1		W16
					Self Reflection: CCR2		W16
W14	19 February		Self Reflection		Self Reflection: CCR3		W16
					Self Reflection CCR4		W16
W15	26 February		Self Reflection
W16	4 March		Finalise
W17	11 March		Finalise		Final Film Opening		W17
					Final CCR

Week 1

In this week, we did a mini project about recreating a famous scene from the same genre we chose. We chose Paranormal Activity because it was easy and was filming with only one take. This made us realise that making our found footage scene would be easy and fast. Although it will take a while to get since it's a long take, we will hope to get the scene done under 2 takes. 

Week 2

In this week we decided to practice how to edit and continued finishing our filming schedule. We had to make a blog about editing and the steps we did when we were editing the clips that my teacher gave us to work with. We also learned about new theories about audience. We learned about reading and how we view the media. These theories includes Cultivation, Desensitisation, Social Learning, and Reception Theory.

Week 3

In this week, we learned about Dominant Reading and had a blog about this for our project. We also learned about 3 different audience theory which was based on gender and sex. The 3 theories included Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey, Leisbet Van Zooner.  This week we also decided to continue with our project blogs which was more about our production and the dominant reading.

Week 4

We only had 1 day of media since we had a 3 day holiday which skipped most of our media classes. So our teacher decided to just have us do our project work in class for the whole session. During the editing, we had a few feedbacks which changed our project idea so much. We decided to discuss about how our opening scene can help start an actual movie.. since our sub-genre is found footage, this will be challenging. 

Week 5

Due to our national holiday (Chinese New Year) We didn't have a Media class. Because of this, because I don't celebrate this holiday, I had free time to do my blogs like the research, gave editing tips for my team member, and scrolled on TikTok to look at some inspirations.

Week 6

Our school closed and we had an online class due to the extreme weather. During these classes, we started discussing about our CCR1 and CCR2. We also had to do our Audience Feedback where we sent forms to people to review our work and give suggestions to make it better. We then had to insert all the feedbacks and our development in a blog post for our teacher to check on it so see if we've done it or not.

Week 7

This was a week where we did mocks. We did our first Media Studies Mocks and had a lesson about how to answer Section A and B. We ended the week by learning the next few CCRs which were CCR3 and CCR4. Since most people skipped the mocks, we weren't able to review and find out our scores. For the past few weeks, we are getting near to our deadline to submit everything.

Week 8

In this week, we mostly focused on our mock exams. We had a mock test review from our first paper and on the next meeting, we had our second mock test. This week was very chill and simple because our teacher had to accompany the g12 students because they had a camping trip. So in the last day, we were told to finish up our project and our CCRs in class.

Week 9

This was a week where we started to finish up our project. We had our final mock exam on the first day of the week and had the rest of the week to do our project. Since we were busy with other mocks,. and wasn't able to share ideas, we finally were able to share these thought in this week. We watched a new found footage film that helped inspired us to shorten up our editing since our clips were more than 2 minutes.

Team

This is my team for my opening scene project.

Maise: https://mai-regentsmedia.blogspot.com/

Lamiya: https://miya-regentsmedia.blogspot.com/

Kellie: https://kellie-regentsmedia.blogspot.com/ 

Reflection: This was my team for my project. It was as my previous team because I had no other choice. But because one of my team moved out from media studies, a new student who just came into my school decided to join media, which was perfect to recruit her because we needed one more team member. In my opinion, I think that working with the same people can help remember the mistakes we've done so we can improve better. Overall, I enjoy having them as my opening scene project team. 

Project Brief

Here is the brief for my opening scene project.

Reflection: When I found out that this project was going to be about an opening scene, I was very excited. I had so much ideas that I couldn't even decide what to use for my actual project. Because I wanted to make something unique and completely different from what I usually see students make, I think this will motivate me into actually taking my project serious. Even though there are more research and more work, I hope that everything will go out perfectly.