What makes an effective film opening?
What makes an effective film opening? Well that is the question I am going to answer in this essay. There are a lot of factors that make a good film opening such as sound, lighting and effects. The film I will be using is “S.W.A.T”. I have chosen this film because I think it has a good film opening; it has a mix of sounds and visual effects. Personally I love my film openings to be packed full of explosions special effects and action, faint music in the background so you still get an effect from music as well as the action. I think that with an explosive exciting opening you get glued to the screen waiting for the next big bang.
At the beginning of “S.W.A.T” all you can hear at first is a police radio but you can’t see the radio you can only hear the transmissions, then it fades into police lights flashing. The word S.W.A.T gradually comes into the police lights that are still flashing. The radio continues and the camera slowly uses a big close-up effect into the Hollywood sign, you hear helicopters and the camera angle moves over the hill where you get a long shot of police helicopters flying over Los Angeles. The scene changes so that you’re in the city not above it and you get a camera effect as if you were watching this event on the news; because of this the camera switches quickly between things. This makes the viewer fell like it’s real so you really get engrossed into the film because it looks so real. The viewers emotions will be more dramatic because it seems so real, it doesn’t seem like it’s a typical movie.
There are then gunshots that you hear and a woman running past police cars. The sound gives you the idea that there is a shooting going on between police and criminals, but you’re not sure because you haven’t seen this yet. The viewer gets glued to the screen, because they want to see what really is going on. The radio still continues and you then get a quick close shot of two men in balaclavas shooting at police. If you listen to the radio and not the actual event sounds it tells you what is going on. At some points they make the actual event noise quieter, so you hear a certain part of...