Post 3a: Further Look At Opening Sequences

In order to get a better idea of what I can do for my opening scene I had a look around for some other opening sequences in order to develop my understanding of what works and what doesn't when I'm producing my scene.

The first film i looked at was The Bourne Identity (watched on a DVD due to there not being an opening on youtube).

The Bourne Identity is a spy thriller with a similar tone as the one we are looking to make. One thing that it does very well is that it establishes the film with mystery and does this by using a wide shot of Jason Bourne floating still in the stormy sea. This creates mystery by having him unrecognisable so that the audience ask themselves, who is that? and how did he get there?

Another technique they use in the opening scene is by having the weather as very stormy and dangerous. This is used as a pathetic fallacy by having the weather reflect on the events on screen whilst also setting the tone of the scene and the rest of the film.
During this scene they also use silhouettes to increase the mysterious tone of the film. It has this effect by showing that there is ponies there but by only showing their outline it leads ponies to wonder about whats happening.
Through out the scene it mainly uses diegetic sound but when he is pulled out of the boat an intense film score starts up, thus showing us how important the character of Jason is.
One genre convention that is used in this scene is the use of close ups and extreme close ups when the boats crewman is operating on Jason Bourne. This is used as a genre convention because it adds supence by not showing the peoples faces, therefore adding further mystery.



Another opening i looked at is the opening of Se7en (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEZK7mJoPLY). Se7en is a psychological thriller with a slightly darker tone than what we are looking for but it will be a good one for us to look at because of the acclaim it received.
One genre convention that the opening uses from the start is the close up. Here it is used to hide the killers face in order to add a depth of mystery as to whom the killer is.
A technique that the opening uses is a scratched hoof made font. This is in order to set the tone of the film as a grimy and gritty serial killer thriller.
The soundtrack in the opening also reflects on the tone of the film with it being a low experimental industrial soundtrack with no dialogue until the very end,it reflects on the grimy and violent tone of the film.


Another thing that i looked at in order to get a better perspective on what to do for our piece is watch a thriller opening made by another 6th form group. For this i chose Creeping Shadows, an opening to another psychological thriller (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0JQNvICD4U).
The first thing i noticed about this is that it appeared to take influence from Se7en, i saw this from the close ups of the mysterious objects and also the soundtrack that they chose.
One problem that i saw was that in the opening few shots of the makes there want much diversity in shots or content. whilst they did use multiple shots they were all close ups, with the lighting appearing to change very slightly all on the same object over and over again. This is something that we should avoid if we want to use close ups because it has the potential to bore the viewer.
Another techniques that i feel it falls shot on is the font, i feel this way because whilst it does work i feel that there are fonts that could have worked bettor for the kind of film that they were creating, for example i would have used something along the lines of http://www.dafont.com/sf-gushing-meadow.font as this would have fit the horror/thriller vibe a lot better.
One other part that lets the sequence down is that the diegetic audio is very poor quality, this leads to it being hard to hear characters and to get immersed into whats going on. One way they could have fixed this is by using Foley and re-dubbing the audio.
One part where i think the film succeeded was with the horror/thriller genre convention of the voyeuristic camera, and the idea that the camera is looking in on whats going on from the outside.
I also felt that it got the pacing and suspense down very well with the use of multiple shots and short cuts, towards the end with the longer black picture with the heartbeat in the background worked very well to create a sense of foreboding mystery.