T2-61

I was impressed with the amount of planning that was put in by the group. They had tried out different styles of giving the impression of CCTV footage, and had pasted these attempt onto their blog.

They had also done some location scouting for the area that they'd be filming in, and had a couple of ideas about different camera shots for some of the more complicated techniques they were trying to use for the film.

They wrote out a full props, costumes and locations list in great detail. It's good to see this amount of planning and it is clear that they took time to find the locations and decide how it would be filmed. They even also took a screen shot of the sound-track from Garage Band closer to the end of production.

They had a full animatic which gave a good idea of what the sequence would look like, and showed that they thought of several of the title ideas quite early on, making the planning more impressive.

They had analyzed a sequence from the film Panic Room (sound and camera-work), and had also analyzed the introduction sequence from Enemy of the State. The latter consists of a breif history and run through of the film with a very detailed essay on the sequence.

As for the sequence (and rough-cut), it wasn't really up to the standards set by the planning. They had planned to have a CCTV camera, but on filming they shot the scene to-be on standing level. It's things like this that can ruin immersion. How many CCTV cameras are at shoulder height?

Also there is a random addition of heavy base (in the finished sequence) at the start which just simply doesn't fit. It makes the sequence seem far more student-made. When the main theme comes in it seems more unrelated as well because of this.

Another immersion issue (which would only really be a problem to very pedantic people) is that when the over-the-shoulder camera is showing the CCTV footage, it is simply a video being played on Quicktime. This is not that important, but they could have found a way to simply blur the outside so it wasn't so obvious.

The camera shots, while okay, are not great. They seem to promote that it is a student made film and don't carry the complexity of real film camera shots. Also, in the planning stage of the scene, they had a shot directly on the characters phone. This was a better shot than the one they actually used in the sequence.

Aside from it's faults however, it is a good introduction sequence, and with a few tweaks could be made very good.