BULLET BOY OPENING ANALYSIS

BULLET BOY OPENING ANALYSIS

The film starts with cast names in a simple white font upon a black background ascending and descending around the screen in a random looking sequence while soft music is playing. It then shows a young boy confined in a very dark and small space. He has a tourch in his hand which he shines. the camera is very bumpy and we hear sounds of speeding cars passing by therefore the audience immediately believes he is in the trunk of a moving car. The shot gradually goes into a bright white screen and the film title "BULLET BOY" appears in a simple, black font in capital letters.

The next thing we see is a man lying down in a room. the camera is from the outside of the room and looking in through the glass on the door. we hear keys jingle and a lock open. the man gets up quickly and the person that opened the door says "come on sleepy head time to go home". as the camera moves about we begin to see more of the room. Combining all that we have heard and seen within the past few seconds it is safe to say that he is in a cell block. he leaves the cell and enters the reception. the prison looks fairly small and low security. He approaches another officer who is behind the desk and leans on the desk. the officers tells him to get off the desk in an authoritive manner and the man cooperates. this immediately tells us the relationship between the charcters and the statuses that they hold. the prisoner does not look very exited to be free so maybe his life outside the prison is not so happy. The prison officer asks the prisoner for his details and he replys quickly and you get the sense that he is use to being asked his details and has accustomed to his life in prison. Through out the scene the camera is very shakey and has slight panning shots. the camera is definitely being hand-held. i believe the director did this in order to engage the audience into the scene more. A shaky camera gives the impression that we are in the scene and the panning works as though we are rotating our neck.

After analysing the opening i took in the conventions and things they did. I think analysing Bullet Boy was very important because it is very similar to our film on several levels. Firstly, because they're both social realist films in London. Also, they are aimed at the same sort of audience and involve the same type of characters; Teenagers, to young adolescents to older adults. Finally Bullet boy is such a good film to analyse is because it is fairly low budget and obviously our film is too. Although the Bullet Boy editing is far more sophisticated than ours will be it is still in the lower end of the budget scale. This shows us ideas that we may be able to use.

By Ash Khan