You will need to pause the video in order to read the annotations as they are quite long and the video is too short to have time to read them all. All the annotations are written below the video if you wish to look back over my answer without repeatedly watching the video. There is also an extra introductory paragraph which I wrote on my blog which I chose not to put in the annotated youtube video because it wasn't relevant to my personal film opening and genre.
There are different ways directors approach openings; they either start it with a bang, have a full on action sequence providing some information but really leaving the whole sequence as a narrative enigma (e.g. Logan and Heat) or start out with scene setting, laying out all the information the audience initially needs (e.g. Beauty and the Beast and The Great Gatsby). Either way, the audience has got to be hooked by either the shocking opening sequence or the gripping, interesting plot.
Usually we're introduced to our hero first, getting their point of view of the story as they are the protagonist.
Idents always come before the film opening, some memorable ones are the lion in the MGM ident and the iconic drum beat for 20th Century Fox.
From the ident on, film openings vary dramatically depending on the genre, target audience and director's vision. A popular start is to begin with a black screen and have a voiceover (this is done effectively in 'Mad Max: Fury Road' and 'Deepwater Horizon') but other films can begin with wide shots of the landscape in which the film is set (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) or extreme close ups of characters or objects. Each decision has a different impact on the film, helping them be differentiated into genres.
In the genre of film I chose there are several different variations of conventions that can be used. Crime thrillers can be made to be very dark and sinister such as 'Silence of the Lambs' and 'Se7en' but they can also be humorous and quite comedic like 'Ocean's 11'. They can even span into the action genre with films like 'The Bourne Identity'. I really liked this about the genre as it gave me quite a large scope to work with without being hugely constricted by genre conventions. However, once I had decided on my place in the genre I definitely wanted to stick within boundaries enough to appeal to my target audience and clearly display which genre I was working within. To do this I did a lot of research into crime thrillers to determine the sound, camera work, mise en scene, editing and characters which are conventional to the darker side of this genre.
Once I had done this I began to decide what I was going to use in my opening and which things I wanted to develop or challenge.
The first thing I looked at were characters - whether the protagonist tended to be male or female. I found that in previous crime thrillers women were often the victims (this is clearly shown in 'Zodiac') and men were the investigators or heroes who solved the crimes again shown in 'Zodiac' and 'Se7en' . This is also true for modern day TV shows, the most obvious one being 'Sherlock'. However, there has recently been releases of new crime thrillers which star females as the leads such as 'Gone Girl' and 'The Girl on the Train'. This shows a development in the breaking down of female stereotypes and opened up the appeal to a more female heavy target audience. Therefore I chose to continue this and have a female lead in my film. Although she is initially the victim, as she is attacked by the murderer in the opening of the film, the fact that she doesn't cower away and hide or run away from the town shows her strength and determination. She chooses to stay in the town where she is at the top of a hit list to try and help solve the investigation and save the lives of others from her home. Therefore I would say I'm conforming to the more modern conventions of the crime thriller genre by using a strong female lead. However, it could also be said that I'm challenging the old genre conventions of male leads by developing the new conventions of female protagonists.
I also took a lot of inspiration from my research when producing the look of my film. I specifically looked at the transition into the beginning of 'Gone Girl', I really liked the fade from black in with the muted, cold colours. You can see the influence of this in my opening as the tension is built by the music and dialogue. This muted colour range is a typical convention of films of this genre and is not only seen in the 'Gone Girl' opening but also very obvious in 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'. However, I did choose to break this convention in my second flashback where I added a lot of red to the mise en scene to connote danger and tragedy. I did this because I though it was beneficial to my film opening as it is the point in the sequence where the music changes to create a more threatening tone and I wanted the mood of the footage to reflect that.
I really made the most of the manual focus in my opening because I wanted to use it to create tension and intrigue as well as ensuring the audience was focussing on the correct thing in the frame. This use of focus is clear in the 'Collateral' film opening as the background extras are blurred and the main characters are in focus. I really liked the effect this had and how interesting it made the footage to watch for the audience so I decided to stick within this convention and play with the focus of my own film opening, specifically in the first scene and flashback two.
I also liked the handheld camera work of this opening and the hectic feel it created. This style of filming is also used very effectively in 'The Bourne Identity' and made me really eager to use it in my own film opening as each of the flashbacks is supposed to build tension and feel personal to Emma as we're in her memories. Therefore I also decided to stay within this convention as it worked really well within the formula of my film.
When it came to the sound I put a lot of thought into what I wanted to layer under my film. I especially liked the sound on 'Fargo' and took inspiration from this as well as the initial music in the 'Gone Girl' opening. I was certain that I needed to have a full underscore as this was vital to tie my opening together an make it into a more coherent package. However, when I looked at my research the music I put to my opening was actually very in-keeping with the genre conventions. The films 'The Bourne Identity', 'Fargo' and 'Gone Girl' show this sound very clearly. 'Zodiac' also used sound but used a song with lyrics, incorporating intertextuality and breaking genre conventions. I used the music to pull the film together and help build tension, fitting with conventions of this genre.
The titles for my film opening took a lot of consideration and research. I looked at what is conventional in other openings and found that the text is generally sans-serif and muted in colour. I wanted the text to fit in with these conventions but also be slightly odd like the titles on 'Zodiac' and 'Se7en'. To do this I picked a font which was unfinished to reflect how parts of the investigation were missing. I also wanted the colour of the text to be red. This was unconventional because generally the colours are black, white or grey but I thought it was worth doing something different for the sinister tone it put on the end of my film which actually clearly led it to the darker side of the crime thriller genre, exactly where I wanted it to be placed.
I also broke genre conventions in the position of my title in relation to the rest of my film. Instead of it coming at the beginning, directly after the credits, I decided to have my title appear at the end of the film opening to make a bigger impact after the climax of the sequence - the scream. I believe it was a good decision to challenge the genre conventions in this way because I think it improved my film opening and put more weight into the title instead of passing it off whilst other action was taking place. It also reflects how Dreamtown is not a place of safety and comfort as it would have been presented at the beginning when Emma was comforting her sister. Instead it follows the protagonist's bloodcurdling scream at the end, connoting that the town is a place of danger and violence - a much more accurate representation of the film to come.
However, when it came to my credits I decided to stick much more to genre conventions giving that I'd broken them quite dramatically with the main titles. I had the text very simple and sans-serif. It was white and I used a font very similar to that seen in 'Gone Girl' and 'Zodiac'. I also capitalised the letters to make it seem more clinical and professional, more in keeping with the tone of a murder investigation. Capitalised text is also very conventional as it's seen in every crime thriller title sequence I researched. Therefore I decided to keep with this text style in both my credits and my title sequence.
When I researched crime thrillers I found that close-ups are a very conventional camera angle, seen clearly in the openings of 'Gone Girl', 'The Departed', 'Seven', 'Collateral' and 'Pulp Fiction', either on a persons face or a particular object (e.g. the gun in 'Pulp Fiction'). Therefore I decided to use quite a lot of close-ups in my opening as I wanted it to feel very personal to Emma as we are essentially in her memories for the majority of the sequence. Sticking to this genre convention also helped me build tension as, with a close-up, the audience tends to be more on edge as you can't see what's going on in the wider world.
However, at the end of my opening I decided to break, not only genre conventions, but general film conventions when I asked Lucy to look directly into the camera lens when she sits up and screams. This breaks the fourth wall meaning the audience are taken by surprise as they are directly invited into the action, really making them feel as though they could be a resident of Dreamtown. This is not done very often at all in cinema but when it is used it has a huge effect on the audience which is exactly what I wanted my opening to have.
My film opening sticks to genre conventions pretty well to help clearly define it as a crime thriller. However I challenged conventions quite significantly in one major part of my story - the age of the characters. Generally in this genre the cast are older to reflect the more mature plot lines and subject matter. This does come with some exceptions such as in 'Zodiac' when the opening sequence involves a young girl and boy, however, the protagonists are older therefore returning back to genre conventions. In my film opening the protagonist is an 18 year old girl - a big break of genre conventions. I used a younger protagonist this because I wanted to appeal to a younger target audience and my audience research clearly showed that the age and gender of the protagonist hugely impacted on the people who went to see the film. Therefore to appeal to younger viewers I used a younger protagonist and involved subplots such as a relationship Emma has which she's discussing with her mum at the start of the film.
Although my protagonist is younger, many of the other characters in the film are older such as the police investigators Emma works with to solve the murder. This is more in-keeping with genre conventions whilst still appealing to my target audience - females aged 18-25.
Finally I decided that using a younger protagonist would work because there have been successful crime thriller TV shows that used teenage girls as lead roles such as 'Pretty Little Liars' which had an average audience age of 18-24. Therefore I decided to break this genre convention for the benefit of my film and it's success in reaching it's target audience.
Overall my film opening stays well within genre conventions with the occasional break such as my use of colour or the structure of my title. The only big break in genre conventions I have is the age of my protagonist which I think is justified and positively effects my film. The opening stays within the genre conventions enough to define itself as a crime thriller whilst still being innovative and interesting for the audience with variations and developments of the genre conventions which set it apart as exciting and unique, not just another stereotyped version of something people have already seen.
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