Deconstruction of The List Film Opening

In preparation for creating our own film opening we thought it would be a good idea to look at other examples that people have already produced to get an idea of a certain standard we need to produce, and also to notice flaws in their videos that we should try to avoid in our own work. I decided to deconstruct 'The List' from guernsey media group, I believe the genre they were aiming for this to be in was psychological horror as there are no bloody or gory parts in it but a build up that leads to the girl in it to be gone with only her hoody and the sheets of paper she was holding left floating on the water she was standing by. I thought this would be helpful to look at to get an idea what a final product of a sub genre of horror film opening looks like as we have decided to make ours supernatural horror.



Sound:
- To begin there is only non-diegetic sound as the girl is walking down onto the beach, it sounds like a slow pop song and you cant hear any diegetic sounds from the scene as it is quite loud.
- It then becomes apparent to us that she is wearing headphones and the music drifts out as she takes them off her head, which has been edited well.
- There is no sound for a few seconds and then a different type of non-diegetic music is played it sounds creepy and sinister, we then hear off screen diegetic sound of a person breathing quite heavily watching her from a distance played over the top.
- The non-diegetic music continues and is the only thing you can hear in the scene it is powerful in creating an impact on the audience and reflect the mood of the sequence.

I thought this camera angle was effective as it is an establishing shot showing the full scenery of where they are and works well with the typography how they have placed it and the colours and font style they have used. This is effective for setting the scene and atmosphere of the sequence from the beginning and I think it also worked well with the non-diegetic sound.

I liked the idea they had and how they presented the book which was all about the girl who was the next victim on the killers list, also they used a POV (Point of View) shot to display this which engaged the audience to the story more and makes it more personal as if it was happening to us, which creates fear and also makes us scared for what is going to happen to the girl as we are now aware that she is in danger.

Straight cut edits are used throughout the sequence but speed up as the killer is getting closer and closer to the girl as he is coming up behind her, this works well as we see the girl becoming more distressed and dramatic irony is used as she does not know he is approaching her but the audience are aware.

Towards the end of the sequence the jumper the girl was wearing and pages from the book she was looking at are shown laying on the water but she is not shown again, this suggests to the audience she has been taken or killed by the villain. Personally I think this could have been made to have a scarier ending as the build up was effective.





Overall I think that this film opening was effective in terms of mise en scene, sound, editing and camera angles, all of these were presented well throughout the sequence and showed they were well thought out as a variety of techniques were used. The fact they used no dialogue made it more professional which is an aspect we want to use within our own opening so it looks as less amateur as possible. In my opinion this opening could have been even better if the ending had more of a scary impact to match the build up and the rest of the clip.