The Drama!

After finally deciding the genre as drama, my group and I can now move into researching examples to help us along the start of this project. The drama genre is very versatile, with characters having a wide variety of conflicts often ranging from conflicts with themselves, others, and their environment. There are countless examples of great drama films with amazing openings and here are just a couple I used to get ideas.

Example One: The Shape of Water
This film opening comes from a Best Picture winning film that shows some of the best parts of a traditional drama film while also showing the versatility of the drama genre. The stunning underwater visuals automatically capture the viewers attention, a very important part of a film opening that I am trying to focus on in my own opening. Of course, effects on the level of this film are impossible for my group, but the idea of grabbing the attention of the audience with interesting visuals and colors remains. The use narration provides a glimpse into the tone of the story as well as parts of the story including love and a monster. This use of narration provides an example of a technique that I could use in my own opening to set up parts of the story and to further grab the audiences attention.

Example Two: Dunkirk
This film opening comes from the historical drama Dunkirk and almost immediately puts you in the middle of a gun fight to grab the attention of the audience. The use of text provides historical context and gives the audience a better idea of what is going on. I could use this technique in y film opening to quickly provide the audience with context behind the story instead of having to film it all for the opening. This example gives me a good idea of how to build suspense through the use of music and imagery especially with the wide open spaces.

Example Three: Baby Driver
In this example, the first half of the opening almost fully relies on the use of music and sound effects to create an interesting film opening. This shows me the importance of audio in a film opening and it will surely be a large element to consider when I am making my opening. The example then goes into a fast paced car chase that makes use of quick editing paired with the fast song. This shows me the importance of editing in the film opening process and how much of an impact the editing can have on a film. For this scene the fast paced editing helped to grab attention, a large focus of my film opening, but can also be used in different ways other than a fast paced car scene. With the versatility of the drama genre I have a large selection of unique techniques at my disposal.