Forms and conventions of thriller title sequences- Question 1.

 While making our thriller sequence we had to consider the forms and conventions of other thriller opening sequences in order to make ours look authentic. I have already blogged about this topic previously, but not in reference to the specific conventions of thriller movie openings, so here are some shots from our opening which were particularly influenced by the conventions of others thrillers:

(Above and right) here we intertextualised  a shot from the Black swan movie; the close-up of the main character's face, particularly her eyes, builds suspense as you can see her expression clearly.

(above, right) In both these shots,  the location is established; in both cases, you cannot clearly see the location and therefore are left with a sense of mystery and suspense; a key convention of thriller movies.

(above, right) We also used this shot of just the pointe shoes as we thought this shot was particularly effective at building the suspense; due to the fact that we don't see the character's face, from this we can interpret that ballet is very important to her, possibly the only good thing in her life.

(left) The sound we used changed many times throughout the process of making the opening; initially, we used the music from a music box that we recorded ourselves, but in the end, we realised that a slow, creepy dancing tune would be best to portray both the dancing element and the supernatural/psychological sub-genres of the thriller, and we only used the music box tune for the very end, to build the tension and uneasiness.

(right) I think the titles used in our title sequence were very effective as we set them to appear in the specific order that they usually appear in all film openings, e.g. the production company comes first, the title is in the middle, and the director comes at the end of the opening.





(above, left) Our titles were mainly inspired by the titles of Se7en. We used a similar flickering effect, and the same colour for the words when the appear and exit the screen, we initially also wanted to use a childlike font similar to Se7en, but we came to realise that a simple serif font would be more effective and more fitting with the Victorian theme running throughout.