Question 1 - Script

I think our film opening of ‘Karma’ has followed the conventions of a thriller film opening, as well as the conventional order of the title sequence. There is a strict order in which names and jobs appear in the opening credits because it shows the order of importance for who is involved in the film.  The companies involved are shown first of all as they give us the money towards making the film, most significant actors in the film come after this because if they are the most famous it will influence more people to watch the film as they have a high status and are known to be in good films. Then the casting crew, costume designers, music and editing crew, production designer, director of photography, executive producer, the writer(s) and finally the Director. This shows that the main people involved in the making of the film are shown last so their names are the most memorable and they get the most credit for their hard work. An opening that has inspired my thrillers credits is 'se7en', I like the way this sequence has been edited to have black screens with the main titles on and black sections with titles on for the majority of the credits, so they show on top of the film opening. I also like the font used. We did not use this effect on our own title sequence, however we did have a black screen for when the film title was showing. The conventions of a film opening and especially for the genre of a thriller are that there tends to be lots of fast flashing images with cross cut editing, to suggest dramatic events. The background music is usually very dramatic and intense, in the thriller ‘Enemy of the state’ there is non-diegetic music which sound like computer generated noises and sirens, so this hooks the audience to set up questions about what the genre of the film is and what might happen in it. The first scene is of the landscape, to set the scene. I think we achieved this in ‘Karma’ also as we included a wide shot of a playground for the flashback scene. Another optional convention for a thriller is to change the lighting to something possibly darker, more supernatural or to look like CCTV cameras through the use of editing. We also incorporated this on final cut pro with a lighting change video filter, we made the footage a bright white and also made it more black and white but not fully, so there is still some colour. This is to make it look like a flashback. Introducing the main character is an important convention for narrative openings, I would say that our film opening for ‘Karma’ is a mix of a narrative/ stylized opening. Because we introduce the main characters, set the scene and vaguely present their situation. Also like a stylized opening, I feel we have achieved sophisticated editing with lots of transitions and effects.  In a way it is possible that our film opening could be seen as a discrete opening because the majority of it is in flashbacks and therefore separate to the rest of the film, however it is still relevant to the main film. voice over is important because it tells us a bit about the plot, when adding foley sound of voice to our opening, we did not make the plot too clear but I feel with the selection of words we recorded, it gives the audience an idea of the themes of our film, the genre and a bit of back story of the main character. To highlight who the main character is, I learnt from the film ‘Billion Dollar Brain’ that to make it clear to the audience who the main character is, the use of camera for slow panning and zooming in with the focus on Palmer highlights that he is the main character, so this is a useful technique that we took into account when filming ‘Karma’. In this film, a dissolve transition is used to blend the opening prologue scene into the opening credits, we used a lot of dissolve transitions in our opening to make our scene more smooth flowing as we had a wide variety of shots that didn’t always match together so it would have looked like jump cuts without the use of transition effects. When I researched Psychological Thrillers I noticed that they conventionally tend to start off by introducing the main characters in an everyday life situation, as did we similarly by introducing the character in bed, dreaming. They don't go straight into telling us what is wrong with the character, or to give anything away about what might happen later on in the film. I think this creates tension to make it more creepy and dramatic when the audience sees later in the film the thought processes behind these characters. They conventionally introduce part of the genre/ theme of the film in the first few minutes, and also by creating an almost surreal scene of the main character this emphasises the genre because the audience is unsure whether this is reality or her dream. I feel we included these conventions in our film opening successfully.