Opening Sequence Research

World war z

 

The purpose of this opening sequence is to set the scene for the audience and let us know a little bit about what to suspect in the film, introduce main characters and start telling us the story. The conventions of a zombie film will be met by there being some kind of apocalypse or epidemic killing a large number of people and then the film will show either how they defeat the zombies as a collective or someones individual story throughout the epidemic. The shots in this opening sequence are all abstract and look like a shattered glass with different parts of the shot in focus and some aren’t with different parts laying over eachother yet we are still able to see what is in the scene. The shots are made up of news footage of people at desks so a lot of medium shots and then shots of animals in the jungle and on the beach so long shots. There are a lot fo close ups on peoples activities to show what people are doing around the world such as people on trains etc and then they cut to different locations around the world to show this a film based all around the world- the zombies affect the whole world. The settings  range from a train station, the beach, a news studio to an African plain to symbolise the vast affect whatever the zombie issue in this film will be is a global issue. The lighting within the natural scenes is all naturalistic daylight weather which is quite neutral and then the shots in the studio would have the studio lighting so it looks a lot more hd and advanced than the scenes of the outdoors; this contrasts well and shows the two differences between the real world and the media world. There is nobody in this opening sequence that is focused on more than once or even specifically so nobody is introduced to us yet as a protagonist, everyone in it already is either a member of the public in a large crowd or a news reporter. The text is all in one font in the corner of the screen and is shown whilst there is activity in the sequence, at the end of the scene the black cutting around the edge of the scene zooms out to reveal the title of the film with activity still going on in the background, this again symbolises the world is to do with the film. The pace is all quick cuts and transitions although each one shows something for a few seconds, towards the end of the extract the shots get shorter and shorter as the pace picks up. The sound is a mixture between digetic and non digetic. The digetic is the birds flying and chirping, and the wild animals as they attack and eat things, also the news reporters room you would be able to hear it all aswell but because they mix it all into a sound collage so they show us one bit of sound and then cut to another scene and the sound is still playing over something it doesn’t match so the sound keeps building up and up as the shots get shorter for affect.

The opening sequence in Se7en represents the Crime Thriller drama well in a variety of ways. The purpose of the opening sequence is to grab the audience’s attention; this has been done by making us question what he’s doing with all this torture equipment. The convention of this sequence reinforces the genre with the torture weapons, the criminal records and the interesting books he’s reading from with diagrams in and the effects. The shots are all point of view shots and are never of anything but objects, this infers to us that we are the ones doing something and lets us in on a secret. The angles are all high angles the consistency of the cinematography focuses our attention on the props and not things such as the movement or people. The setting is all at one big white desk with dim lighting focusing on certain objects, the lighting leaves shadows which make it look eerie, this reinforces the genre again. The only character in the opening sequence isn’t revealed to us, we only see their hands; this leaves an element of mystery and foreboding and suggests that this is who the film is going to be about and their identity will not be revealed until the very end as the film unravels. The text in this film is an interesting font, black and flickers. The flickering of the text looks like a broken lamp which reinforces the genre. The pace of this is fairly quick, not noticeably fast but it does help to build suspense and keep the audience interested in the props within the opening scene. The transitions are quick and the sound is all non-diegetic. We can’t hear anything that the person within the scene is doing all we can hear is creepy techno music and then occasionally a strange sound effect like a screech or a bang. This fits the Barthes theory of the enigma code and portrays a mystery.