Research

In order to create a successful opening sequence, we decided as a group to research different genres of films to enhance our knowledge. After combining a couple of simple ideas together, we needed to expand the ideas we already have to make it more complex and to produce a piece at the best of our abilities. We decided to do a lot of research on two particular genres: thriller and mystery; this was because we thoroughly enjoyed creating our preliminary exercise which also followed mystery and thriller. To start our research, we decided to search the most successful thriller and mystery genre films to date. When searching we came across a list of the top 50 movies for our specific genres. A film near the top was The Dark Knight, a quite recent film.

The Dark Knight was directed by Christopher Nolan who has also directed The Prestige which again follows the genre we are looking at. After seeing the dark knight as one of the most popular mystery/thrillers we decided to watch the opening scene. After seeing the production company’s logo and the main title for the film, we are introduced by a long shot a city. Gradually the camera gets closer to a building where you can hear synchronous sound gradually getting louder until you reach the building where the sound becomes immediately louder when the action begins. The scene then cuts into a frame on ground level in the city where we are provided with a mid shot of a clown mask which gradually zooms in. Again the sound is gradually increased to provide tension on what is about to happen. We are shown it is a very populated city, by many people in the background in their suits walking past. Editing has been used in a very creative way, by showing the audience the little scenes of the two different groups working together; this fastens the pace and makes it more exciting as a viewer. This research will later on provide inspirations for our film.

When researching movies of the mystery and thriller genre we found that there are many generic features throughout both genres, for example, the way that sound is used to build up tension when something important or scary is about to happen. Although we were going to produce an opening sequence using present day techniques, we also did research on early mystery/thriller films. This meant we could see how techniques in the genre have changed over years and also if we could get any ideas to use in our own piece. One particular film which was directed by the famous Alfred Hitchcock was The Birds.
Compared to the more recent film The Dark Knight, The Birds starts off as a normal film where an establishing shot shows us a woman, walking through San Francisco town; this establishes the scene as to where we are, provided by mise en scene. When the protagonist gets to the front door of a pet shop, we get to see a generic feature in most mystery/thriller films which is where the character looks at something, in this case a flock of birds in the sky, and the camera switches to a close up of the characters face to see the emotion and reaction of something. We believe this will be a technique which we will have to incorporate in our piece. Sound was used creatively during birds, for example Alfred Hitchcock used a lot of ambient and diegetic sounds to make this opening sequence more natural and realistic. He did incidentally make one of the first scenes in a pet shop where we can hear birds tweet, giving us another clue following the shock reaction of the flock of birds in the sky, that the story later on will be about birds. These are subtle clues used effectively to tell us what expect later on.From this we have gained knowledge that even present day films take techniques from old dated movies.

After watching the opening sequence to this film, it led us on to researching directors. Alfred Hitchcock was the first one we researched because he was one if not the best director of mystery/thriller genres of his era. Directing many films including The Birds and Psycho, he is a well known director and very influential. The director was alive for over 80 years, providing the film industry with many moving films which are still watched today. He used to have certain trademarks in his films what you can notice throughout most of them, for example, he liked to have scenes in bathrooms, as he believed it was a good place for romance or to hide from someone or something. Although our research was purely for films, we did seem to end up with a couple of directors who do most of their work with TV shows. We decided to research on a TV director to provide more examples of opening sequences. The director for TV we mostly researched was director J.J Abrams. He directs many popular shows following the mystery/thriller genre including Alias and Fringe. He has directed a few movies as well, for example Cloverfield and also the upcoming Star Trek film. One of our favourite points what J.J Abrams does in nearly all his directed pieces is start the mystery straight away by putting the character into action and making the audience question the mystery until later when it unfolds. This is a clever feature which we should implant in our piece as it is very effective and is quite a generic feature in the mystery and thriller genres.

Television shows and films were quite alike when it came to the genre of Mystery and Thriller, the only major differences were that television shows either revealed the mystery that episode or at a later date in the season. While generally films only had a certain time period to reveal the mystery unless creating a sequel. Other than that, they were generally the same with the same techniques used, so for example, to create tension the volume of the music increased while the speed was increased to get us as an audience ready for something big to happen or a shocking revelation. From the researching we collected, this will lead us on to taking notes on a couple of movies to gather inspirations from them while still looking back at research to gather more information to form a strong idea for an opening sequence.