Opening Sequence Task

For our film opening task we have chosen a crime/drama genre, as we decided that our storyline was going to be about the disappearance of Genette Tate. Genette went missing when she was only 13 years old and has been missing since for 38 years, making her one of the longest missing people in the UK. Even though the disappearance took place in 1978 we have chosen to do a modern twist on the story.

The first thing we did was research and watch other opening sequences with the same chosen genre and kind of storyline to ours. We watched The Blair Witch Project, Stranger Things as well as The Missing which is another student film with the same kind of idea. While watching these sequences it helped us come up with the different conventions of a crime/drama such as:

• Mystery 
• Realistic characters, storyline and settings
• Tension
• Journey of character development 

As well as conventions it is important to have narrative enigmas within the first couple of minutes of a film as this is what keeps the audience guessing and making them hooked to watch on because they want the answers to their questions answered. Some of the enigmas we came up with that link to our sequence are:

• What happened to her?
• Where did she go?
• How long has she been missing?
• Was it planned?

Through out our opening we are going to use both non-digetic and digetic sound. The digetic sound will be the girls talking and cars going past in the background and our non-digetic sound will be the echo of the girls laughing and emphasised door clicking. Some of the shots that we will also be using our:

• Match on action
• Tracking shot
• Close up shot
• Over the shoulder shot
• Low angle shot