After studying into different opening sequences I have become more informed into what needs to be included in an opening sequence. The several conventions that you are most expected to see are: establishing shots, a soundtrack, titles and logos, close-ups and slow paced editing. These conventions are commonly used to engage the audience into the important details involved in the opening sequence. For example, establishing shots allows the audience to observe the surroundings of the characters and overall where the film will be mainly set. The establishing shot is also the key shot for the audience to gather information/clues about the film or what the plot is. In one of the opening sequences that I observed Wallander, at the very beginning of the opening sequence we see the whole of the setting and it's entire surroundings. This tells the audience where everything is and how there are only three people at the hillside which is fairly peculiar. The establishing shot in this opening sequence gives as massive clues and instantly makes the audience ask themselves questions. When planning our opening sequence we thought about ways we could make sure of engaging our audience as this is key. We thought of ideas such as, close-ups to not give away too much information, this will also keep the audience wondering about the answers that they wasn't given.
Pleasingly, our idea I feel worked because of the responce I recieved from my peers. But they also gave me areas which I will work on. The establishing shot that we included in our opening sequence worked well because it shows a messy typical boy teenager's room, which is the idea we wanted to put across as our character is a very mysterious and weird teenager that doesn't come out of his room a lot, and we thought by showing the bedroom this message would easily be put across.
Pleasingly, our idea I feel worked because of the responce I recieved from my peers. But they also gave me areas which I will work on. The establishing shot that we included in our opening sequence worked well because it shows a messy typical boy teenager's room, which is the idea we wanted to put across as our character is a very mysterious and weird teenager that doesn't come out of his room a lot, and we thought by showing the bedroom this message would easily be put across.
Our chosen genre: a Sci-fi Thriller clearly has it's own key conventions such as: technology as in every sci-fi film you see you will always see in some shap or form something to do with technology, fast paced music this was demonstrated in the research we done as we always found that there was always an upbeat sound in the background, close-ups were used to hide particular information, a code we saw was involved in most storylines which is something that we based our storyline about as it is a typical convention of a sci-fo thriller. For instance, in The Matrix, we saw a lot of the shots used in their opening sequence was showing most of some sort of code. The code being in the colour green which we saw a lot, so therefore we thought it would be a wise idea to include a lot of green, making it as much as a sci-fi thriller as possible. This has been used when showing several parts of the code we have which shows that part of the film is about hacking.
Furthermore, in my opening sequence we tried to include as many close-ups as possible of objects and characters, this was to show details that you wouldn't take any notice of if the shot was further away giving the audience more information to think about and take in. All this being things that the opening sequence of The Matrix made me think about.
In my opening sequence at the beginning we wanted to build up a sort of suspence and tense mood for the audience, as the music starts off quite low key and slow. This would be engaging the audience creating a mood of confusion wondering what is going to happen. But as we get further into the opening sequence and the music starts to get a lot faster and up beat the mood starts to get a lot more relaxed as the audience become familiar with what the theme of the opening sequence is. We thought including these type of moods would be essential as after watching The Matrix, it created a mood which fitted the genre and how the audience should be feeling with what theme of film they are watching.
Question Two:
In my opening sequence, our main character is a teenage boy with a quite unique personality. We have clothes him in dark/black to show his personality of being very secret and dark, he likes to sit in his room on his computer most of the time making him a bit of a nerd and computer freak. As our character is wearing all black, it makes him look quite boring and plain like he doesn't care about what he looks like which tells the audience a lot about our character and portraying the right messages across. The character that we wanted to create was the typical nerd that stays at home all the time and knows everything about technology which in modern day is called a bit nerdy and saying he is not as popular as other people, especially with the way that he hides his personality making it difficult to understand and get familiar with him.
