Evaluation Of Film Opening

Our brief was to make a film opening from a thriller film. It was aimed at teenagers around the age of 15-18 years old. we had to use a variety of shots to convey meaning and tension. We used as many codes and conventions as we could to help add atmosphere to the scene.

   To begin with, I looked at a wide range of thriller films opening including scenes from Cape Fear, The Secret Window and Silence Of The Lambs. These helped me to understand what the codes and conventions of thriller films are and how they can be used to emphasise the tension and darkness of the scene being shown. Examples of this are in 'The Secret Window', they are seen because the opening scene is set during the night and is dark so it reflects the characters mood at the time and also helps the audience to understand how Johnny Depp's character feels in this opening. We used several of the codes and conventions in our opening, this helps to engage the audience more and make it a darker storyline. Codes and conventions we used are setting it at night, making the victim innocent, keeping a mysterious vibe about the stalker and setting it along a muddy, unused trail to create a sense of isolation from any other people.

  Codes and conventions that are in feature length thrillers are mainly big orchestral music used as the soundtrack, with the string section often causing the most sound, darkness is often used to created atmosphere and shadows help convey mystery and strange feelings towards characters.

  Another feature I looked at were the opening titles of films. I mainly looked at Alfred Hitchcock films including Vertigo, Psycho and North By Northwest. I discovered that Saul Bass created many of these films opening credits as well as making the titles for 'Goodfellas' and 'Cape Fear'. I also found out that he inspired the 'James Bond' franchise openings because of how similar they are to Saul Bass' original work.

  I believe that our piece works well as it creates a dark, tense mood in an audience. This means that the group were successful in using the codes and conventions of thriller films to our advantage and showing we had a good understanding of what they were and how to use them.
  It worked well because of how we represented the characters within the opening. The protagonist is represented as young, innocent and happy with life because of the use of camera angles and her costume, whereas the antagonist is represented as mysterious and unknown because we never see the stalkers face due to the mise-en-scene and camera angles. These are very stereotypical and help the audience to understand what is going on a lot easier.

  Throughout our planning we had one main idea, which was that the killer would leave cryptic clues on the people that he murdered. This was based on the film Zodiac which follows an everyday man who takes up the task of decoding messages left by the killer. as the term went on though we realised that the idea would be far too complicated and so we simplified it quite a bit. Now instead of coded sentences we decided to use pictures to guide the victims to a location where they would be alone and easy to overpower. We also added the instruction "Follow the pictures" because it would help the audience to understand what the picture would mean.

  Other challenges included when we could find time to film so the whole group went out one day and tried to film as much as we could in the middle of the afternoon. When we viewed the clips after we filmed we found there were not enough to pick from incase we needed any different versions, otherwise our film opening would have been like an Edward D Wood Jr. film, jumpy and full of errors. To over come this we re-filmed during the day on the weekend and then used a certain special effect on iMovie, Day into Night, to make it look as though it was filmed during dusk.

  We took our inspiration from one of the films that were made a coursework for last years Year 12 coursework, Hallutionation by Jay Boucher, Adam Bowler and Ben Hopkins but our main idea came from the film Zodiac. We used this to develop our idea because during the late part of production we experimented with some transitions to cover up some noticable jumps in the film. We then changed it to suggest that the stalker may just be a figment of the girls imagination because of her fear about being isolated from other people. This can explain why the audience never see what hapens to the girl after the hand reaches out.

  The title was based on the idea of coded messages being left on a victims body, but in the end result the 'codes' part of the title referrers to the pictures that were in the envelop. We incorperated the encrypted codes in the title by using the numbers 3 and 0 as the letters e and o. If I could redo this I would use this idea in the credits section of the film as well.

  I would use the internet to distribute my opening because it's quick, easy to follow and it can be acessed by  many different types of people all over the world at the click of a button and then they can tell their friends via email, etc, etc. This opening would be aimed at teenagers around 15-18 years old as these are the most likely to watch a thriller film. I would attract my audience by sending the URL of a Youtube page that would show the opening when someone clicked on it. This is because it is a quick and simple way to get people interested in the films opening and then maybe the whole film.

  I have learned a lot about how to edit a film using iMovie and I think this will help me with future projects if this system is required to used to edit. I have learned how difficult it can be to get the shot you need and that it is necassary to keep a bank of shots that can be used incase you run into difficulty trying to find the shot you want to use. I began to understand how techniques such as slowing down a clip  and making it darker can be used to my advantage as it seems to add a great deal of tension to the clip as if made the subject even more daunting. Other things I learned using iMovie was how to put titles on the clip, how to add pictures to the video, adding special effects to certain clips and how to edit the scene together without any major jumps in the film.

We chose the name Zodiac Productions because of the film our piece was based on. I then decided that it would be better to use a symbol of the zodiac as our companies logo. We used the sign of Capricorn because it was one of the first zodiac symbols. To finish I believe my group did fairly well considering how little time we spent together outside of school, mostly because of difficulty to meet up and discuss ideas for the film. If we had more time though I think that what we could have done would have been many times better because we could spend more time on what we needed to sort out and not worry about it and have it pile on top of everything else in our lives.

  Looking back at the preliminary task I feel that I have learnt many things over the course of the project because at the start I didn't even know how to work the type of camera we used to film both the continuity piece and the main task.



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