Jelly Babies Activity

The jelly babies activity involved creating a storyboard for a 2 minute long film opening based on a list of film briefs we were given to choose from. The jelly babies were used to help with the positioning of characters on the storyboard in order to think about framing and composition in regards to shots. The purpose of this activity was to get us thinking about the typical conventions for the genres given and to form a narrative that would only cover the first two minutes of a film rather than tell the whole storyline.

The film brief we chose to create a storyboard for was the genre of sci-fi, in which aliens invade the Earth. Within our storyboard the pace is slow and introduces the main protagonist as this is often the case with the beginnings of many films as to focus the audience's attention on one character. Various shots are used throughout the storyboard, such as close-ups to focus on the radio, an establishing shot of the surroundings to show how isolated and alone the character is and mid-shots of the character driving in order to clearly show expressions and actions.

The narrative shown within the storyboard reveals a male character (shown with the jelly baby on the various post-it notes) driving their car in the middle of an area that is perhaps far off from civilisation and alone. He then proceeds to turn the radio on, in which diegetic sound would be used to show a radio presenter saying, "Welcome to Projection Radio!"- this then links to the title of the film, which is shown through the character's eyes as he looks out onto the road. Establishing shots are then used to focus on the surroundings, showing an unidentifiable object in the sky amongst the stars that peaks the audience's curiosity and prompts them to carry on watching. Diegetic sound from the radio then says "It's a clear night tonight." to which the main character looks up at the sky, eyes looking at the object in the sky for the camera to then show, through various close ups, as to what the object is. From here an extreme closeup is used on the object in the sky- a UFO- and the audience can see lots of aliens inside through a window.

Various things within the storyboard comply to the generic conventions of sci-fi- particularly with how the main protagonist seems to be aware of the UFO, despite it being far away in the sky. It could be argued that the radio represents the ignorant public, who believe that nothing wrong is about to happen. Since we only created the storyboard to cover the opening, this is the only main generic convention used but more would be revealed later in the film- we did not want a lot to happen in the opening but for there to still be enough that would be interesting for the viewer.


Overall, from the jelly baby activity I learnt more about the positioning of characters and how much actually happens within the first two minutes of an opening scene- that not much narrative is revealed but there are still conventions which link to the genre. It also made me think more about the positioning and timing of titles and how they can be integrated within a film opening in different ways depending on the genre.