21. Practical Remake Activity - Evaluation

My group and I recreated the title sequence to the well known movie Gone Girl for our practical remake activity. As seen in my previous posts, our group had to plan, film and edit this piece in order to accurately remake this sequence. Overall with the final product, I think our group did very well and made a good title sequence.




Planning was the easiest part of creating this piece as we had a shot outline plan and a storyboard (seen on my planning post) which helped us know what types of shots to take. So whilst watching the title sequence to the film we noted down all the shots we would need before we rented our camera and started filming.

Gone Girl (2014) — Art of the Title

Our group did not stray far from the college as it is based in central London, so all of our shots were filmed in Angel. We had filmed in our college, the city and a nearby canal. Because of our location it made it very difficult to get certain shots. For example:

In this shot the actual shot type was supposed to be a long shot as you can see the actor's whole body in the frame. We could not obtain this shot as there was a car in the way where we needed to place the camera, meaning we had to make this a medium long shot. As well as this it was also hard to make all the shots dark like in the actual sequence:

As seen in the image above our shot is not as dark the the actual one. Because of this the title on our shot can not be seen clearly. We tried to edit this and make it darker but it just made the boat in the shot blend into the darkness. As well as this our group could not get certain shots like the close up of a rock on the floor, which meant that we did have some missing titles in the sequence. These are some of the problem we faced, though in the end we were still able to produce our sequence.

However we got some accurate shots that we used in our sequence:

I think that this is a good shot as just like the original, we had got a low angle shot of a clock along surrounded by buildings. This is one of the many good shots we got for our sequence. Some of the titles in the original sequence were on a black screen which we added in using Adobe After Effects (used to add in the titles to all of our shots):

Using this editing feature was very difficult in the beginning as we did not know how to edit title on a black screen or on a moving shot, but the more we used it, the easier it became for us to edit our piece. I'm also happy that we did not just do still shots and that we were able to make a match cut in the sequence which we had posted to Twitter:

So proud of this match cut 🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼 pic.twitter.com/QdnsWvamAr

— AS Set2 Media Group8 (@Candigroup8) October 19, 2015

Overall, I think our group worked very well together to produce the piece we created and presented the concept of the original sequence in our remake. It was a success. looking back on this, I would choose to focus on time management, as this was the major factor as to why we could not get all the shots. Along with this I would focus on getting more accurate shots as not all of them looked like the ones in the original sequence.