Research

We studied the opening scene of 'City Of God' the scene opens with the titles on a black background in complete silence, you then suddenly hear and see the sharpening of a knife, this sudden change grips the viewer and makes them want to see what is going to happen. The scene uses a flashback, the colour of the surrounding flashes back from dull to warm bright colours, this suggests that things have got worse since then. The scene uses subtitles as there only way of us understanding what the characters are saying, as the characters speak a foreign language that we would most likely not understand.

Research

Before we start our project, we needed to research some examples of titles and openings of current fiction films. The opening of 'Six Feet Under' is a good example of an opening title sequence, despite being a TV series and not a film. The sequence uses impact points on the soundtrack to fit in with the movement of the video, such as the sudden wheel movement of the trolley. The sequence tries to give the audience an impression of what the programme is likely to be about, in this case; the video contains a variety of representations linked to death. For example the withering of the flower.


We also studied Dexter, which was also a TV series, the title sequence uses close ups of morning routine events, and these close-ups suggest something rather more sinister. For example there is a close up of Dexter cutting raw meat, this could be thought of or mistaken as human flesh. There are other everyday occurrences in this title sequence that  we might think of as being sinister as we most likely already know that Dexter is a serial killer. For example when he is putting on his t-shirt, it appears as if he is putting somebody in a body bag.



Cold Mountain was a film that we studied the opening scene of. Text on screen is used to tell us when the film is set, in this case it is 1864, which suggests to us that the film will be old fashioned, and that the technology featured in the film will be primitive, for example the military equipment is fairly basic.

Brief

Video

Main Task: the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes.