First Media Lesson Back

Monday 5th January 2009, today's lesson.

we watched a documentary about film openings, called "watching".

we was given a sheet with questions to answer while watching the documentary. the people in the documentary where talking about how build ups in a movie should be, either they are slow with little but enough information for the audience to follow up on or if the opening to a film should give a lot of information about the main character and include a lot of action and suspense. Both ways can be used to make the audience satisfied with the film, but the film maker has to make the rest of the film as interesting as the beginning. Then the documentary moved on to talking about how some films started their opening in a very different and unconventional, but yet effective ways. The films that were used as an example was seven, where the opening of the film included the credits and the footage that gave us some clues about the main charcter and the pace and theme of the whole film. this was done by using key images of what is going to be the main point of the film. we also watched the opening sequence to " The shinning". We discussed how the suspence was being held. We also mentioned that the way the camera was on a helicopter looking down on to the tiny car that the main characters where travleing in, made it look like some thing was following the car and the people in the car. The camera was not zoomed in our focused on the car, but it is hard not to notice the car becuase that is actualy what you main focus is ment to be on. aftet about two shots of senery and seeing the car more than 3 times makes us as the audience realise that the camera is actually following the car. which creates the impresstion that the car is being followed by something and it seems as if they are going the wrong way.

After we had watched this we moved on to talking about, how we would make our own thriller openings. I thought about how I would make my own thriller opening but then i quickly moved on to thinking about what else i should write into the first pharagraph of this blog.