Monday 5th January Lesson Overview

“Watching” documentary
On Monday’s lesson we watched a documentary about film openings as a class. There were interviews with directors such as Jean Jacques Beineix, Orson Welles, and critics such as Thomas Sutcliffe and Stanley Kauffmann. The documentary was about answering the question “how should a film opening work”.

T.V critic Thomas Sutcliffe described films that need to seduce their audience into long term commitment and that the temptation to go for instant arousal is the most irresistible. In other words, very fast opening movies need to instantly grab attention and let the audience want to watch the rest of the movie.

However according French director Jean Jacques Beineix, the risk of having instant arousal in the opening of a movie is that you may not be able to answer the questions afterwards, or even not be able to make the rest even dramatic than the beginning.

Stanley Kauffmann describes the classic opening with a long distance shot of the city, a mid shot of the shops, a long shot of the building and a mid shot though the window to the main character. He says that this type of opening works because it allows the audience to know that everything is well before the dilemma kicks in.

Student Thriller Openings
We watched a few clips from thriller openings that students had previously made before.

Blasphemy
This opening was a psychological thriller about a religious freak that collects pictures of people and makes adjustments in the dark and underlines quotations from the bible. It was very similar to the opening of the film “Seven”. This opening had very slow tracking shots of the church, long shots of the main character entering the church, there was speeding up of the non digetic sound, and close-ups of the process of cutting the photos. I think this opening had a target audience of 25-35 year olds.

Essex Road
This thriller opening is about a police officer trying to solve a murder case of a girl who was attacked in an underground station. The police officer was in his office trying to work out clues to catch the killer. The camera focuses on the girl with long and mid range shots, there was a close-up of the bracelet she dropped in the station to show the importance of the murder case, there was fast editing of the reconstruction at the time she was murdered. I think this opening had a target audience of 20-45 year olds

Timecode
This thriller opening was about a boy who wakes up in a back alley finding himself hand-cuffed to a briefcase. After a long struggle to get it out of his hand off, he sees a man on the other side of the alley, and it finishes. The pace of the film was slow. It was a good established location, where there wasn’t anyone in the public caught on camera. There was a good variety of shots. I think that this opening had a target audience of 25-45 year olds.

Days Are Numbered
This opening was quite significant to the other ones as it didn’t express its genre as a thriller, because it starts of quite peaceful with an old man rowing his boat, together with a few shot of a teenage girl. All of this seemed quite normal. The title credits and the gentle music bought about the notion of serenity. I think that this opening had a target audience of 35+

Thriller Films & Audience
In this part of the lesson we looked at statistics to find out the types of genres certain genders liked to see. There was a sample of films that were out at around the same time. We concluded that men were more likely to watch films from action, war and violence genres. We found out that women would tend to watch romantic comedy movies. We also found out that women were equally likely to watch thriller films than men.