Molly's Media Blog

Summarise your film idea. Provide a brief synopsis and outline what happens in your film opening.

Our film idea was focused on one particular school boy who suffers from a mental condition called paranoia - hence the film title. The opening scene of the film follows the boy's daily school routine, beginning with his entrance into school, moving on to him at his locker, walking through the corridors and sitting in the assembly hall, among other shots. At the start of the scene our main character comes across as an ordinary school boy, the shot is quite bright and the scene has a positive feel to it. As the scene progresses, the shots get darker and darker as the boy's mental state starts to deteriorate and this is shown with the cracking effect on the screen. The cracks and rough marks on the screen get gradually worse as the scene moves on and by the end of the scene the shot is covered in these rough marks. This shows that the paranoia has completely taken over the character and he is in a different mental state to the one he was in at the start of the scene. The final shot shows the title of the film, very fitting to the scene so far and this brings the opening scene to a nice finish and very clearly shows what the genre of the film is - a psychological thriller.

What kind of information has been included in your film opening?

In our film opening we included the opening credits which showed the names of the actors, the director and the producer, among other important roles in the making of a film. The film opening did not give too much away and left a sense of mystery and suspense to the character and his situation, however we do find out that he is psychologically troubled and is a very lonely boy in a school environment. As well as establishing our main character and the setting of the film, we also discover the genre of the film which was quite clearly shown to be a psychological thriller.

How do the titles link to the main film idea?

The font we chose for the titles was very rough-edged, grungy and cracked which linked in well to the rough crack effect we used on the screen. This emphasised the uneasy and unstable state of mind that our main character is in during the film. The titles were positioned into the scene rather than just stuck in the middle over the top of our shots. The bold font makes our titles much more integrated into the shot in a way that they can be clearly seen but yet do not detract from the action on screen.

Identify three things that you included in your grid that are important in the construction of an opening sequence and explain their role in understanding the film.

1. In our grid we included a wide range of shot types which made the opening scene much more interesting. We used mid shots, long shots, over the shoulder shots, and shots from directly above the character's head. These were all effective for different purposes and reasons; for example the long shots that we used, showed how alone and isolated he was with no one else around him.
2. The titles we used in our opening scene were very bold and they fitted in very well into our shots and they definitely helped to establish the genre of the film which helps the audience understand what type of film they are about to watch.
3. In our grid it was important to introduce the audience to our main character, it was important to do this as he was the only character included in our opening sequence which helps the audience to understand that the film will mainly revolve around him.

How effective is your project as a film opening?

I feel that our grid project was successful as a film opening considering the amount of time we had to come up with an idea, take the shots, edit and finish. The opening establishes the genre, the setting, the general mood to the film, a slight grasp of what sort of character we are dealing with and what sort of story is about to unfold.