This Is England Part 1 Analysis

The film begins by showing a montage of typically 80s fads/crazes/phenomenons and well known figures (including the arcade video game "Space Invaders", the TV show "Knight Rider" and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher) spliced between its opening titles, while non-digetic reggae music plays simultaneously. The music continues as a moving shot of an old, run down British suburb is shown, while the film title is superimposed onto this. As the music continues, so does the montage of clips, which include school boys, 80s bands playing, exercise groups and major national events such as Princess Diana's marriage to Prince Charles, the race riots and the Falklands War.

The main plot itself begins in July 1983, on the last day of term, when 12 year old white British boy and protagonist Shaun wakes up in the morning and promptly makes his way to the newsagents to read a comic without buying it, which leads to a dispute between him and the Asian shopkeeper in which Shaun calls him a "mong" as his thrown out, which is slang, shorthand and racist for "mongoloid". Shaun then goes to school and gets into a fight with a bully who makes an offensive joke about Shaun's deceased father who died in the Falklands war. They are then both broken up by teachers and dragged to the Headmaster's office, and Shaun is made to wait outside while the bully is caned by the Headmaster (caning was a typical punishment for school pupils in the 80s until it was outlawed). Then, on the way home, Shaun runs into a group of skinheads in an underpass led by Woody, who Shaun later starts hanging out with before they accept him as part of the group.

Final Edit and Upload...

On Tuesday March 18th we completed our sound balancing to enhance the voice overs over the diegetic ambient sound and non-diegetic sound track, a collectively decided adjustment we decided we needed to make based on a peer-feedback session, and that the voice overs are a significant element of the sequence to carrying the story-line.

Following the completion of the final-cut, we exported and uploaded the sequence to youtube, writing a brief pitch to accompany it. We have so far garnered 103 views in the first 24 hours since posting.

We have prepared our commentary/evaluation, which we will record over our sequence tomorrow.

Stay Tuned...

Progess Thus Far

First draft of the script was completed in mid February.

Preliminary filming was started during the previous half term and completed during the half term holiday. Filming went more or less according to plan, however, we found that we were over ambitious in our original goal, as we filmed an excessive amount of footage (around 15 minutes, including retakes however).

Editing of footage into a two minute opening sequence has been completed,and visual effects, credits and a soundtrack have also been completed and applied. Even with the cuts that we were forced to make in order to fit it into the allocated running time, the film so far meets and in some ways surpasses my original vision. Our final sequence has surpassed our original predictions by four seconds, bring the total running time to 132 seconds. This meets the exact time limit of 2 minutes as well as the 10% extra allowance.

All that remains is to record and apply the voice track and then configure the entire film's sound balance properly. We are running slightly behind schedule, however this is due to the poor weather conditions earlier in February that forced the closure of college and thus denied us access to resources for two days (I understand an extra ten days were allocated to us because of this? - Ed).

Stay tuned...