Rough Cut Evaluation

"Refugee" Opening Title Sequence Evaluation

Our chosen genre for our title sequence was "drama". This decision was made due to the fact that there were many other groups doing "Thriller" genre, so we wanted to do a different story. As for our theme, we were inspired by the true events of Syrian tradegies and the life of hustling refugees. In our narrative title sequence, it tells a story of a Syrian refugee who has escaped the troubles of her country and is still traumitised by the danger and loss she has experienced.

To distinguish between her past position and her present, we firstly combined videos of her feet walking in her boots around a clean environment along with videos of her walking in flat brown shoes, sarrounding her is rocks, pebbles and broken down houses. We did this to show the audience how disastrous her life was before compared to now, being in a riskless, undamaged environment.

In addition to this, we also used match-cuts to distinguish between the past and the present day of her life. An example of this is when the girl drops the £1 coin on the tissue. In here, we filmed an extreme close-up of the side of the coin to create a cinematic effect. We then filmed a wide angle of the girl begging in the streets with little money which takes us to the girl's past. As for the location of this shot, we decided that the tunnel under the London bridge would be best as the lighting is dark at the back to show how tragic her days were before. The lighting was brighter outisde the tunnel where she was facing, which hints that her days will be brighter in the future.

Another match-cut we used was the letting go of hands in the park between the two girls. We used a close-up shot of the hands and as they were letting go, the Syrian girl's past is triggered again by this and it takes us to when she was with her sister, still struggling and homeless. The letting go of the hands also symbolises another theme of our title sequence which is loss. However, this particular scene is quite ironic as it contrasts with the idea that the Syrain girl is trying to move on and let go of the past which is supported with the use of specific props such as framed pictures of her and her sister and other members of the family.









Overall, a positive thing about our rough title sequence is the match-cuts we used in most scenes and their ability to distinguish between the past and present through simple editing in post-production. Another positive point is the different camera angles we were able to use such as close-ups and wide angles to show the importance of certain props such as the pictures and the different shoes.

However, a limitation is that in certain scenes, the lighting was not very good so it made it harder to distinguish between the past and present and certain scenes looked like they were of a thriller genre rather than a drama genre. To improve on this, we may need to use lighting equipment to make it brighter and record earlier in the day to get better, natural light. Earlier filming would also help determine if the scene is good enough or if more filming needs to be done.







Another limitation was that in the scene of the girl walking to homeless beggar, the same scarf was used for the beggar as well as for the Syrian girl when she remembers that she was in the same position as her before. To fix this, we decided that filming another scene with a different scene would lose the effective connection between the beggar and Syrian girl the scarf creates. However, a solution this problem is to add a Foley sound of a flashback sound effect to solve this problem so that the audience would not be confused.