Shot Evaluation - Opening Shot

Our opening shot subverts normal opening shots for films of this genre, in that this opening shot shows the audience a full picture that reveals the type of setting the scene is based in. It is not uncommon for action films to start films with an out-of-focus shot or extreme close-up that keeps the audience wanting to see the whole picture for a while. Examples of this include the opening shots from The Bourne Identity and Jack Reacher, whose opening shots do not provide the audience with any information whatsoever and instead show things with seemingly little significance. Time restraints meant we couldn't use this method in our own scene. Our opening shot shows the scene is set in a mostly rural environment as opposed to a large city landscape. We felt it would be interesting to set the opening of an action film in this sort of setting as the audience does not expect it, with a conventional large set-piece set in London or in an exotic international location being the expected opening from our audience. We helped the audience to locate the setting as a mostly rural environment by lining up our shot to include as many trees and bushes as we could, with the colour green signifying the natural element to this location that would be noticeably absent from the grey concrete of the city.

This shot also helps to introduce our main character. We wanted to build audience anticipation by having the characters arrival be the focus of the beginning of the scene and letting the audience know the character is important. The audience know that the trains arrival is significant as we have purposely shown them the barriers closing in the opening shot, the train approaching the platform, and then the character stepping off the train. This works much better at letting the audience know which character is the focus of the scene than if we had have opened with an opening shot of the character just stepping off the train, which would have carried the risk of the character being mistaken as any random person by blending in with the extras in the shot. The horror film Saw that I analysed as part of my research provided inspiration for this technique, in the way that it builds audience anticipation for the reveal of its villain throughout the film, showing him piece by piece, although for our film we have applied the technique to our hero instead.

The only difficulties in achieving this shot were how we had to set up the camera on uneven ground which made it difficult to make the shot level, and how we had to wait for a long time to get the shot of the barriers closing as there was no way of knowing when they would start closing. We also were concerned that the camera could not pick up the sound of the barriers alarms going off, bu luckily in post-production we could increase the volume so the audience could hear it. We were also lucky in that the woman walking in shot on the far right of the screen was an unplanned but welcome addition to the shot, as we felt it added some substance to the scene. She is only ever shown on the least important third of the screen and she has trouble walking with a cane which makes her seem vulnerable and should make the audience feel sorry for her as she has to wait for the train to go past. A persons vulnerability is a theme that carries on to the end of the scene where our main character is wounded by the arrow.

The title font we used in our scene was Agency FB. The sharp neon blue was chosen to make the titles stand out against the background and make it easier to read. We also made certain words in each credit larger and others smaller to highlight the names and companies involved in making the film to the audience. In this shot, we placed the title right in the middle of the shot, firstly to make it more noticeable and secondly because it looked best in this position as it had the plain concrete as a background.