E1: In what ways does my opening sequence use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real opening sequences?

I used a common convention of psychological thriller opening sequences with the drone establishing shot, which is similar to Psycho (1960) as well as countless others. This establishes setting as well as tone for the film, and this is my opening shot as I thought it would be most effective at drawing the audience in but also giving them an idea of where the film is set. In Psycho, the setting is clearly a busy city whereas ours is a quiet estate; however psychological thrillers don't tend to have a conventional setting so I did not challenge this necessarily.

 

Another common convention I included was the use of small credits. In the example of Gone Girl (2014) the credits are shown in a fade to black separate from the scene, but although they are the only thing on the screen they are still in a small font size, so that audiences can focus on the action rather than the text. In mine, I decided to develop this by keeping a small font size but making the font lower case instead of all capitals.



The form of most psychological thrillers is dark and atmospheric, so I used this in post-production as I couldn't control the natural lighting outside. I added a dark vignette filter to my opening sequence, which is similar to the minimal lighting used in Girl, Interrupted (1999) which would have been created by a combination of controlling the lighting on set and also adding filters in editing. This is possibly the most important use of conventions I did, as it makes it more clear that my film is a thriller and that the themes are dark.

Other conventions I used were sound and transitions. For sound, I had no dialogue so I just used a tense music track and kept the diegetic sound of footsteps and birds for more realism. Building tension and suspense is part of the form of all thrillers, so this was essential in my construction. I also made use of fade transitions, which challenge the conventional straight edits or jump cuts in the majority of thrillers. I think these transitions make the change of scene more dramatic and obvious, especially between the running and the police board shots, and also makes my production unique.