Opening Titles Sequence PROJECT (FINISHED!!)

Idea: Henson: Bein'Green

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The Genre of the film is a Drama and the sub genre is a Biopic. I've chosen the genre of drama because lots of dramatic events happen throughout Henson's life. Such as the births of his five children, the death of his brother Paul, the death of Don Salin , the breakdown of his marriage to wife Jane, the failures of the dark crystal,Labyrinth and the Jim Henson hour, the Disney deal and his death in 1990.

My target demographic is 12A so families can watch it. I have chosen this because Jim Henson always wanted his work to be accessible to all ages and his work such as The Muppet Show and Fraggle Rock achieved this. So i wanted to keep his biopic in the same vein so all could enjoy it!

To be able to complete my title sequence i will need to conduct some research. I will need to conduct research on the early life and childhood of Jim Henson. This is because i want my title sequence to show pictures of his early life as a child in Mississippi right up to 1954 when Jim is a young man who finally discovers his dream to be on television and the rest they say is history. So its important for me to be able to find pictures of a young Henson to place in my title sequence. To do this I will be using the MuppetWiki and the Jim Henson Company website for images as well as the Jim Henson biography by Brian Jay Jones

I will also be researching other title sequences from Biopics such as Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman for inspiration

From the very beginning of this project i wanted my opening sequence to be a slide show of images from the Childhood of Jim Henson up to him being a young man with a dream. An early idea f mine included beginning the sequence with a clip from episode 6 of Defunctland's YouTube mini series on Jim Henson. The clip would begin at the New York memorial of Jim Henson and would eventually end on a clip from the Muppets celebrate Jim Henson, a special that aired in September 1990 five months after Jim's death.

I decided against this however because i felt this would be very confusing for an audience starting after his death. So instead I decided to begin the sequence with a quote.

As this film is a biopic rather than a documentary I have had to think about actors to portray the people in the film. i had three options for the role of Jim Henson: Jim Carrey , Sacha Barron Cohen and Paul Rudd. I had considered Jim Carrey because not only is he a brilliant comic but has proven himself to be diverse doing serious roles in films such as The Truman Show, The Majestic and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. I  considered Sacha Barron Cohen because of his ability to transform himself into strange and wonderful characters from all walks of life such as Ali G and Borat, so i felt his abilty to do this would create a great representation of not only Jim but his creations such as the wacky and colourful Muppets. and lastly Paul Rudd because he is a very talented actor. Out of the three I chose Carrey because unlike the other two while they are both talented actors, Carrey has proven himself in dramatic roles. Paul Rudd was cast in the film as Muppet performer Dave Goelz. Emily Blunt, David Cross and BJ Novak are the other actors i have cast in the film as Jane Nebel/Henson, Frank Oz and Richard Hunt respectively

My audio choice has changed a few times as well. from the beginning of the project i had wanted to use Dear Mr Fantasy by Traffic as my song that begins as soon as the quote fades. And for the majority of the production process this was my song choice, However i felt that the images did not fit the beat and overall theme of the song. So I have decided to use a cover of Rainbow Connection by Sleeping At Last. Rainbow Connection was originally written by Paul Williams for The Muppet Movie in 1979 which was the first Muppet feature film and was nominated for best original song at the Academy Awards at the 1980 academy awards. I chose this cover because it has a lot of relevance to Jim Henson and the Muppets.

I wanted my piece to be a slideshow of images from Henson's childhood from a baby to a young man with a dream. This was successful and my final project has lived up to what I originally wanted. However the range of images of Jim's childhood is quite low as he grew up in the 1940's when camera were not as accessible as they are today so I have had to work with all the images i can find even if the quality isn't great.

From the start i had wanted Muppet/Henson project clips to accompany the images in the opening titles and i wanted to use clips from some of Henson's most famous creations such as The Muppet Show, The Muppet movies, Fraggle Rock and Sesame Street.

Out of the five clips i selected, only one of the clips wasn't used, I did not use the Sesame Street clip because i did not  think it fit the feel of the video as the segments I had chosen from the other clips were all either musical moments or involved dancing or some sort of movement 

After deciding on what i wanted to create, selecting actors, images,clips and audio. I had to put together a storyboard before i started the editing process. I had to do this in order to have an understanding of how i wanted the opening title sequence to play out.  And despite my terrible drawings, I completed my storyboard meaning i could start the editing process. 

When I started the editing process, I used photoshop to create two title cards. These two title cards would be used to show the audience who is making the film. They were Walt Disney Pictures Presents and A Jim Henson Company film. There are no effects on these images. They are black backgrounds with big writing in the middle.

When editing i did not use many effects. The main two effects used were cut and fade in/out. However they are not the only effects used. Zoom in/out was used on a couple of occasions but that was accompanied by a fade out. I also used an overlap of two images on a couple of occasions. The effect I had the most trouble with was the zoom in/out as I struggled at first to get it the way I wanted but after I played around with it for a little while, I got the hang of it.
 I wanted my images to synchronise with the images and i hoped that every time that there was a long note or beat that it would match up with the image. I believe I did this successfully.

After two weeks of editing my project was finally completed. And here it is. Enjoy!