Opening Sequence 1 - Secret Window

The Secret Window

The film cuts straight to the action and the protagonist of the film with a head and shoulders shot, with his face in most of the frame for a large proportion of the opening sequence. The first voice we are given is the one from inside of the protagonist’s head. This concept of thoughts and voices is similar to the style I am trying to generate, but I may choose to do this theme is a different way. The camera makes an effort to ensure that the frame is centred around the protagonist and his actions, whether that is a head and shoulders shot or long shot (when he grabs the keys from the motel room, when he reverses back to the motel, or when we see him walking into the room.) At one point he camera is positioned in such a way, to make it feel like a point of view shot, but then once the protagonist moves from inside the car to outside we instantly feel like the omniscient viewer against but who is left in the car for a while. The opening sequence brings moments of suspense as we are not given the whole entire picture of where the character is, what they are doing, etc. Thus this makes the audience hooked already, within the first minute and a half. It is this type of feeling that I want to capture to make sure it appears to be an opening of a film rather than a two minute short movie. From this beginning I think it is not really possible to denote what target audience it is aimed for especially if you are unaware of the storyline. However, due to the fact that a man and women are in bed together, I don’t think the intentions would be to aim it 12 or under, even though there may not be any scene which highlight this nature in the rest of the film. There were minimal props used but, relevant items to protagonist: his glasses, builds the understanding of the character and also, when he steals the room key from the motel reception is vital in allowing him to discover the truth about the female and male character in the room. At the beginning there is no music but the atmos’ of the inside of the car, although the audience is outside. Then is just the diagetic sounds of the protagonist breathing, putting the car into gear, opening the door etc. There is an underlying and subtle piece of non-diagetic music which soon takes priority when the protagonist opens the motel room door and all three characters are shouting and screaming but only a faint scream of the protagonist is heard. Within the editing aspect there are many just cuts which are tied together to add to the continuity side.



Overall I enjoyed the opening sequence due to the main fact that it captured my attention