Watching Film Openings & Analysing Previous Student's Work

In today's lesson with Dan we watched a documentart about film openings abd learnt the following:

• Thomas Sutcliffe says "Films need to seduce their audience into long term commitment. While there are many different types of seduction, the temptation to go for instant arousal is almost irrestistible". He means a way of attracting the audience's attention by making them want to watch the whole film
• According to the director Jean Jacques Beineix, the risk of instant arousal are what comes after. Sustaining the audience's attention
• "A good beginning must make the audience feel that it doesn't know nearly enough yet, and at the same time make sure that it doesn't know too little" because certain amout of information to the audience can limit their interest
• Critic Stanley Kauffmann described one film opening as classic because of the effective use of the camera zoom into a skyscraper
• Kyle Cooper's title sequence to the film 'Seven' is so effective because it shows us the obsessive mad nature of the villian
• The phrase "a favourite trick of Film Noir" means the ending of the film is shown at the beginning. E.g. like in 'Casino' we want to know why the character is killed
• The opening of 'The Shining' creates suspense by the camera's movements acting like a predator by hunting the car from a distance

We also analysed previous students' work on their choice of location, camerawork, editing, lighting, and their use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound. My favourite video was Video5 because as the audience, i felt i understand what the film would be about as it gave me enough information to influence me in watching the whole of the thriller. I liked the way the opening was set in two locations (police office and essex road station) because it showed they gave a lot of thought. I also enjoyed the way there was no diegetic sound being played as the non diegetic sound created more of a suspense. I liked their use of edits because parts of the sequence were in slow motion. The thriller that i disliked the most was Video6 because their poor planning showed through their insufficient footage. I also didn't like the dialogue they used and thought the clip looked far from being a thriller movie.