The opening to my film 'Shadow of your Past' both conforms to and challenges the conventions of real film openings and the genre of crime thriller. It does this in numerous ways, for example typical characters and their behaviour, editing techniques, titles and the overall style of the opening.
'Shadow of your Past' is about a female lawyer, Shania, who, after a rapist she helped prosecute is released from prison, finds herself the target of his rage as he plots revenge against her. The film goes on to focus on Shania as her life starts to unravel with the rapist stalking her, leaving her gifts and eventually reaching his end goal of kidnapping her. After a failed attempt to escape by herself, Shania is later found by the police and taken to safety but the rapist manages to get away. The film ends, therefore, on a slight cliffhanger with Shania attempting to get her life back on track and with the audience left wondering where the rapist has gone and if he'll ever return to Shania's life.
Form
How our film opening conformed to conventions
Please click to enlarge the table below for my answers.
Genre
Below is a mind map on the conventions of thriller films. Those highlighted in a different colour are the ones that we have included in our film opening.
Please click and drag to navigate.
Conventional Characters
Narrative Structure
Below is a Prezi explaining Todorov's Narrative Theory and how it relates to our film.
Other narrative techniques and conventions we used in our opening include:
- Levi Straus' Binary Opposites
- Law vs Crime
- Woman vs Man
- Calm setting vs unsettling event of stalking
- Smooth camera movement on Shania vs shaky, hand-held POV stalker shots
- Propp's Character Theory
- This theory states that there are key characters with set functions in every storyline
- We wanted to challenge this slightly to have a female lead who whilst technically a Victim/damsel in distress, she is still the hero in some respect as she keeps herself alive when kidnapped through her own intelligence and skill, and attempts to save herself without relying on anyone else, particularly a man, to do it for her.
Style
1. Soundtrack
Our opening has two soundtracks which work together to initially create a slightly eerie and unsettling atmosphere with simple classical piano - similar instrumentally to the very beginning of Taken and a similar vibe to the opening of Gone Girl - and then to build tension and match the drama of the red herring sequence, switching to the more 'aggressive' track that gives a more action/thriller atmosphere than the beginning.
2. Grading
Grading was very important to us as we wanted to create a naturalistic, un-glossed look to the opening that is normally seen in British Indies and BBC drama productions. This desaturated, gloomy look also reflects the genre and is similar to the grading seen in Gone Girl and Se7en.
 |
| Graded shot from our opening |
 |
| Graded shot from Gone Girl |
 |
| Shot from the sixth film |
 |
| Shot from the first film |
3. Titles
The wording and order of our titles was inspired by Se7en as previously discussed but it, along with Shutter Island also inspired the unsettling effect we chose for our titles.
The disconcerting shaking effect helps to connote the genre and meets audiences' expectations of opening credits for a crime thriller film.
We chose a simple white font for all of our titles so as not to distract from the action, especially as they are superimposed.
For the actual film title we used a different font to ensure that it stood out and it was inspired by the font seen on the poster for Shutter Island.
 |
| Our film title |
On the whole, I think that our film opening does conform to genre and structural conventions with the only challenges coming from characterisation, as we wanted to represent a social group often neglected in film.
No comments:
Post a Comment