The document discusses the inspiration and creative decisions behind a student film project's opening title sequence. The students were inspired by the opening of the film Se7en and focused on how props were used to set the tense, crime thriller atmosphere. To make the opening their own, they incorporated more long shots, medium shots, and tracking shots. They gave away the location immediately to add tension and bring the action closer to home for viewers. Through surveys, they aimed to develop a male antagonist and use stereotypes while breaking barriers like racial expectations. The opening was seen as important for setting the overall atmosphere and quality of the film.

4. Our main inspiration was Se7en. So we
decided to look most into the opening title
sequence of se7en. We mainly were
influenced by the props the most, and the
way they all link together to make the
atmosphere tense but still make the
audience aware that this is a crime thriller,
by using props that are associated with
crime but being able to build the tension
like a thriller does. By looking at these props
we were also influenced by the shot types,
we noticed that a lot of the shots where
close ups or extreme close ups, which make
the audience feel involved in the film,
however we wanted to make our opening
look like it was inspired by se7en but we
wanted to make it our own. We decided to
do this by including the more long shots,
medium shots and tracking shots.
We did this because we felt that although the main point of a thriller is to leave
the audience asking questions we wanted to still keep this aspect, we wanted the
audience to feel like they were watching a thriller but we wanted them not to ask
the same generic questions that are tried to be achieved by thriller films. We
wanted them to know aspects that other thriller films don’t typically show and
hide things that other thriller films would think is worth hiding, but we wanted
these things to be meaning full. We also gave the location away in the first shot,
this isn’t usually seen as expected in the thriller genre, however we wanted to use
the location against the audience because we felt that the location (A garden
shed) brings the action closer to home for the audience and therefore adds
tension straight away.

5. SOUND

6. MISE-EN-SCENE

10. Looking at these too images we can see a distinct difference in the ethnic
race of the two characters. Although all that we reveal in the opening is the
hands in comparison to later in the film when the full character will be
revealed much like in Pulp Fiction. But already the idea that more suspense
can be built, even though our character is cover in blood and pinning
pictures on the map that are shown to be the next murder victims. In
comparison to the black character that is holding a gun and although they
are at different point in the film and the character of the black man is fully
shown to the audience, the black character holding a gun has more effect on
me personally than the bloody hands that are planning a murder. This is why
we used the other character to try and develop that white men can also
portray an equally harsh tense image of themselves than just the typical
black male.

11. My group created a survey to gain an idea of mainly what characters we should use and how they
should be presented. As shown our target audience would prefer to see a male character. So we
looked into the stereotypes of male characters and we tried to go with some of them and try to break
other ones such as the racially barrier that most people who watch thriller films look at and for in a
dominant assertive character. We thought that a male character would be better for our main task to
use our antagonist to look into developing the role that allowed it to make an atmosphere good
enough to create a effective thriller opening title sequence, we wanted to make the atmosphere
almost at its highest point because during the opening we all noticed that a good thriller was defined
through its opening. The better the atmosphere in the opening the better the overall film. And if our
audience want to see a male antagonist then we would like to use this to our benefit and develop this
throughout the opening.
When we asked what best builds suspense, although our target audience thought music
was best to build up suspense, we also wanted to use our monologue. So we then
wanted to look more at developing the antagonists body language and developing how
this builds suspense because we though this was a key factor into the development of
the intended atmosphere. We wanted to use the props, such as beer bottles and knifes
to make the antagonist body langue stand out and help become a larger factor in the
building of an atmosphere.