Analysis of previous AS Film Opening

To understand how to improve our own film opening we have looked at some previous film openings made by other students. This will help us to see which areas of our film opening have been misses out or could be better.



This film opening is a based around a very different subject to ours, and is in a different style. It covers many characters and a wider time period, introducing the general situation and group dynamic effectively in a fairly short time span. While ours focuses more on the beginning of the overall narrative arc of the film as a whole (which we did plan out before shooting), the technical side of it has helped us to go about improving our own film opening. They use a quick editing style which gives the clip a fast pace, contrasting with the long, wideshot that concludes the opening. This contrast was very effective in making an impact on the viewer, making them want to continue watching, so from this we decided to add a greater variety of shot lengths and camera movement, as most of the shots in our opening are fairly similar.

The mise-en-scene of their film opening was also striking, giving the audience more details of each character and their situations effectively in a subtle manner. The setting of our film opening was our school, which we chose to reflect the trend in zombie movies of being set in familiar places, adding to the fear of something unnatural invading them - something that features a lot in all types of horror movies. While we did attempt to add to the mise-en-scene by adding zombie warning posters that we created, these were not very clear when we edited together our first draft. Watching this film opening made use decide to get better shots of these posters to add to the atmosphere of the film opening, which will also help to build up the tension before the zombies are actually introduced - this build up in tension also adds to the comic effect when the Little Guy is suddenly knocked out.

The music of the completed film opening that we looked at also made us decide to add more sound, to contribute to the build of tension as well. While they had music running throughout, we had already added suitable Western themed music to our film opening. We had also added sound effects, but we decided to add more to increase the effect of the opening, as it had to immediately engage viewers. So we added a heartbeat and breathing sound effect as well as improved sound effects of the zombie being hit, which we created ourselves as none was available for free on the internet.