Friday 21 January 2011

Nice eg of post on an opening

Will has done an excellent post on Halloween, worth sharing as a good example! It combines denotation with wider analysis, and evidences his wider reading whilst also incorporating some multimedia aspects and reflects on how this might influence his group's production. See it here.

Good as it is, there is scope for yet further development! What could enhance this already excellent post?
  • specific stills from the opening to demonstrate some of the detailed denotation of shots, effects, characters etc - I've included 2, from googling (don't have the DVDs to hand), showing how the blue tint was employed in the original and remake
  • a YouTube vid linked to this topic
  • even more additional reading/further resources hyperlinks
  • set out points on 'how this film influences our production' in some combination of a different font/colour/indenting etc (Will has already denoted the quotes by both indenting AND changing the font)
  • an individual or group commentary recorded over the footage of the opening (I've embedded an example of this below)
  • discuss the remake, and the idea of film as 'franchise', comparing box office/budgets and sampling some reviews
  • also worth mentioning here how good the feature-length documentaries, both available to you, American Nightmare and Going to Pieces are on this film, with director John Carpenter featured prominently in both
Let me stress, nobody expects you to go to such lengths with every post; these are just ideas on how you can make your posts so damn good future students will be finding them from googling, and quoting from YOUR analysis!!!

Its also a good think to reflect a little on HOW you found your information/resources. When I looked for images, my first search was "halloween blue tint" - this didn't bring useful results. One brief ponder later I extended this to "carpenter halloween blue tint" and, hey presto, lots of useful results!
When I looked for YouTube vids, I tried "halloween opening scene", which immediately brought good results ... and some unexpected but useful links too.

So, here's the opening of Halloween (and more) with a fan commenting over it:

This one is a fan's own version of the iconic titles

The remake's opening is in there too; here's the link, but I'll skip embedding this given the language included!

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