Problems, problems, problems!

We hit a sticky point recently when we were told that no footage of News Reports of the London Riots could be used in our work because of copyright reasons. This meant we had to re-evaluate the clips we were going to use in our film opening.. Because of the violence and use of fire in the riots we had decided to use a BBC news report showing images of the chaos as it would be really hard to recreate the flames, burning cars and great mobs of people.

Obviously there would be copyright on clippings used on the news so now we couldn't use official images from that week. So instead we looked at uncopyrighted material which we could possibly recreate or make use of in our montage. Luckily a lot of the footage of the riots had been shot using mobile phones so it had not had copyright over it. After having a browse at blog posts created after the riots, I found a link to this montage:

 

This montage of different clips is really useful and could be great if we split it into sections using the editing tools on imovie, as it shows images of the the riots from a variety of angles and perspectives . One of the clips within the montage uses establishing shots of the streets to set the location (on the high streets of London) and shows the vast amount of destruction. This is important because our plot is centered around London and although it's mainly all handheld shots so the quality is sometimes poor and the image in some places is pixilated and shaky, this adds to the idea of panic and the speed at which the rioting spread. Conventional uses of hand held shots are usually in horror/thriller movies which are set in a informative almost documentary style such as The Blair Witch project, so our uses of this is in a way juxtaposing this convention whilst still keeping what the purpose of handheld shots was meant to maintain- the sense of danger and fear.

The montage also shows the varying acts of rioting which occurred; it has more handheld long shots of people looting openly in the streets and extreme long shots of buildings and cars ablaze. As well as a good range of mise en scene: including police on horses and foot showing both the resistance from the people involved in the riots and the people trying to control it. At 1:58 there is a grainy long shot of two teenage girls being caught by the police which stood out as it is parallel to our story line and could be used to foreshadow what could happen to the protagonist our film opening follows. 

The downside; One of the problems with this montage is that there has been sound added over the clips which we are unlikely to want to use. But we can solve this when we are editing by muting the sound of the clips and then we can layer our own dubstep track over the selected bits of clip we want it to cover. When we are editing on I movie we can split the clips into individual sections so we can fast forward certain sections and cross cut between this footage and the footage we have filmed ourselves, which should hopefully be as effective as the if we had used our original footage from the BBC. However after this we discovered that we could actually factor in some copyrighted clips, as long as we edited out the brand logos.