Thriller openings

Student Thriller Openings
In this lesson to gain more of an idea on what we have to film, we watched a few thriller openings that other students had made.

Blasphemy
Blasphemy has the opening of a psychological thriller, a compulsive person that is collecting pictures of people at random. There is great detail to the point that he is cutting and distorting the pictures, as this is the opening there is no insight to why he is doing this. The man also takes time to underline quotes from the bible. Blasphemy takes similar ideas from the film “Seven.” The opening had slow panning and tracking shots of a pathway and church Also, long shots of someone making their way through the abandoned church. An exercise we had to do was decide what sort of age group each film opening would suit, Blasphemy I felt had the target audience of 25-35. It’s a sophisticated opening which didn’t feature too much action and I believe younger audience would need to see something adventurous early to continue watching. 
Essex Road
Essex road is more of an action based thriller opening, centred on a police officer trying to piece together the events of a girl who was attacked in an underground station. The officer was pacing around in his office trying to work out clues to catch the killer, it made me think that someone may be trying to attack him too. The camera shots focuses on the girl with long shots and mid range shots, these were the main focus as she was being chased. There was a close-up of a bracelet she dropped as she was trying to get away, this highlights significance to the film and the officer solving the murder case. The opening uses flashbacks to show the killing and links up the evidence. The target audience age can be lowered compared to Blasphemy as it’s accessible to young viewers from 18-40.  

Timecode
Timecode’s thriller opening is about a boy who wakes up in the middle of nowhere, in a back alley and finds himself hand-cuffed to a briefcase. A frantic attempt takes place to get himself free ensues. He sees a man on the other side of the alley, and the opening comes to a head. The action of the film was slow. The choice of the location was well suited to the action and the background was also good to watch 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
the opening was unique compared to the other thrillers, because it used the idea of not actually being thrilling in the begging to justify an opening that would not be considered thrilling at all. The target audience for this opening would be 35+ as its non-relevance to a thriller may annoy people who are not willing to understand.

Thriller Films & Audience
In this part of the lesson we looked at some statistics that dealt with what types of genres people liked to see and how gender affected them. There was a list of films that were out at the same time. We rightfully concluded that men would be more likely to watch films that focused on action, war and violence. We knew that women would tend to watch more romance and comedy movies. What did surprise me was finding out that women were equally likely to watch thriller films than men.