General codes and conventions of film openings

This blog spot explains a few key codes and conventions used in film openings

Opening Sequence

The opening of a film introduces the audience to the world of time and space in which the narrative takes place. Opening sequences provide a platform from which the narrative is launched and are often called ‘set ups’.

During the opening sequence the filmmaker introduces the characters and begins to develop these characters for the audience who is also orientated into both the physical settings and the historical settings.

Character

Character development is the relation to the audience of a character’s personality, beliefs, strengths, weaknesses and emotions. We are normally introduced to the main protagonist at the start of the narrative. From this point onwards, we learn more about who they really are.

Character development can be done through various narrative devices. The simplest is the traditional ‘Once upon a time…’ fairytale format, which we are immediately introduce to the main character and then told their story.

Another technique is to look back on the character’s life or part of it.


Most films have an introduction of the central protagonist in the opening as this helps the audience to understand who the storyline of the film will be following. Often the character is centrally framed, or tracked to give the effect of the audience actually following them.

An example of both of the above points is Forrest Gump (1994) Robert Zemeckis.
The opening of forrest gump is the main protagonist explaining his life story. This continues for a large part of the movie.

Narative enigmas are key to movie openings as they keep the viewer watching. and to grab the viewers attention. The mystery invoked causes the audience to want to know whats next.

An example of a movie opening that uses Narative enigma is James Bond - Die Another Day (2002)  Lee Tamahori . The end of the opening sees james bond of the end of a drop into some water, With his enemys behind him.

Production Logos
Production logos are always present in any film opening. These show the audience the different companys that worked together together to produce the movie. The production titles will usually be the same across films but sometimes you find that the title will be chanced to fit the movie theme.

An example of the this is in The Matrix (1999) where the title credits to modified to look like this

An example of a movie production credit is

Exposition

Exposition is largely used in movie openings, This comes in the form of dialogue, mise en scene and so on. This is used in openings to explain to the audience key points about the background, back story, settings off the film.

Mise en scene - Some films use a large amout of mise en scene in the openings to show information about the story and characters. An example of this is The Hurt Locker 2008. Where the opening shows the setting which is a run down part of bagdad. The mise en scene relates to war time bagdad.

Narrative - A voice over or dialogue is used to explain what is going on in the story as well as what has happened and why and where. An example of this is Zombieland (2009) where the main character played by Michael A Cera is explaining what has happened in the past in the film.

Subtitles - Subtitles are used in some film openings to explain the back story and what is going on. A very famous example of this is in the opening of all the Star wars (1977 to 2005) movies. Where a few paragraphs of back story float down the screen. This is known as a Crawl. This has been spoofed in many different films.