Making our Opening Sequence a Definitive Thriller

Making our Opening Sequence a Definitive Thriller
Whilst planning and producing our opening sequence, Csenge and I must ensure that the opening sequence closely follows the thriller genre, ensuring it does not develop into a trailer or horror. This is crucial for the film as losing sight of the project's initial brief could result in the film no longer resembling what me and Csenge originally intended. In this short post, I will be discussing what our film could accidentally become, as well as what I will do in order to ensure this doesn't happen.

Horror: Some of the work of former media students resembled, in my opinion, more of a horror than a thriller. I believe that this is mostly due to students' misinterpretation of the brief as well as the thriller genre as a whole. This is clear in pieces such as 'The Ring of Trees' which follows a minimal amount of thriller conventions and instead adopts a more horror themed plot.

To avoid a similar outcome for our own film, Csenge and I will attempt to include as many thriller tropes as possible, meaning the audience finds minimal similarities between our film and modern horrors. We will do this by evaluating our narrative in order to ensure our scene resembles a typical thriller as much as possible. We will frequently ask our peers to evaluate any decisions me and Csenge may make in order to gain an outside view for our opening sequence.
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Trailer: Another point that Csenge and I will observe, is the maintaining of our thriller as an opening sequence, rather than a trailer. The overall objective for our opening sequence is to create tension for the audience, creating a narrative enigma which would hopefully encourage the audience to take interest in the rest of the film. The opening sequence will likely feature a low amount of action, as it will primarily focus on the development of key characters and their role within the film.

This is contrasted by trailers which are used to show the audience the basic synopsis of the film, encouraging them to view the film based on their hopefully positive response to the film in its trailer. Trailers use various extracts from the film, each of which is used to give suggestion to the genre of the film, as well as the themes it may follow. 

Whilst I have not personally seen a student's opening sequence which resembles a thriller, I imagine it could be easy to unintentionally create a trailer rather than an opening sequence. Similar to the idea of our film becoming a horror, me and Csenge will monitor the structure of our opening sequence, ensuring it acts as one, continuous extract, rather than a montage of selected scenes.

Below is the embedded trailer for the 2016 release 'The Girl on the Train'.