Film openings within Drama

Drama and it's Film Openings

The importance of film openings

Why is a film opening important? It sets the scene, the time, the place, the people, and the setting. Most importantly, it has to draw the audience in. Without a great film opening, there is not much incentive or reason for viewers to keep on watching. This not only has been true throughout media history, but with time audiences have gained a greater need for instant gratification. With new technology making everything available to you almost the minute you want it, our patience for "something exciting" has slimmed down dramatically. However, this doesn't necessarily mean there has to be a fast-paced, action-packed beginning that throws the audience straight into the plot (though this certainly is an effective method), it just means the audience's attention needs to be captured and engaged in a way that is appropriate to the context of the movie's plot and potential sub-genre. That said, genres rules are not set in stone. They should be used as a guideline for your artistic expression, however that may look.

Drama Film Opening Samples:

                                                     A Beautiful Mind (2001) Ron Howard

A Beautiful Mind is a drama loosely based off of the story of mathematician, John Forbes Gnash, and his onset of schizophrenia in college that reaches a crescendo in his early career and marriage, but ultimately becomes a renowned mathematician that made fundamental contributions to game theory, differential geometry, and the study of partial differential equations awarded with the Nobel Memorial Prize. The film opens with a scene set in what appears to be a classroom. The room is filled with neutral colors, typically brown which is seen on the walls. This gives a simplistic feeling to it, that the focus shouldn't be on the room itself but what is going on inside it that gives it's context. A series of shot/counter-shot editing techniques go back and forth between the man giving a lecture to his students (again all dressed in neutral colors, suit attire), and the main character John Gnash, who is seen sitting alone, the only one in a grey-black suit compared to his peers, and is seemingly distracted, not looking directly at the lecturer and seems quite fidgety. An eyeline match between him and another student, who is among his peers and sits confidently, paying attention to then looking back and smirking at John in a condescending way emphasizes the idea that John is an asocial and                        nervous kind of character. These edits are all captured with slow zoom in shots that further establish the kind of tone this film, which is that of the perspective of a mentally ill man and how his perspective influences his life. Then, it cuts to a scene outdoors, the men gathered outside socializing. Here we see a slightly different version of John, he's observant, reserved but calmer, and is quite witty. Here, the smaller, less obvious details that something is different about John are insinuated through what he observes.

12 Years a Slave (2013) Steve McQueen

12 Years a Slave follows the story of Solomon Northup, a free black man living in New York pre Civil War, who is captured and enslaved in the south. He faces the cruelties of a slave owner, alongside unexpected kindness from another. After twelve years, he meets an abolitionist from Canada by chance that changes the course of his life forever. The opening scene to this particular film begins with a mid shot, and shot/counter shot editing techniques to convey a group of people being given instructions. We see a group of enslaved people being ordered by a plantation owner on how to properly cut sugarcane. They're all wearing the same drab clothing, showing them stripped of their humanity and individuality and gives the uniformed sense that they are all experiencing this as a collective solely because they happen to be black people in the south. Something really clever I noticed was that the owner said "make it sing", referring to cutting the sugar cane correctly, it then cuts to the camera moving in through the fields to the enslaved people cutting the sugarcane as they sing cultural songs while they worked. Then there's a low angle of two white men sitting idly by, watching the work happen while they fan themselves. The angle helps give the perspective of the enslaved people working, both the literal idea that the white men are above them but also contributes to the lack of power they have to defend themselves against the cruelties of these white men. The scene then transitions to one with a shack, and several of the enslaved people and the main character eating their  "meals", when Solomon notices the dark juice of the berries. Later that night, we see him try to write a letter with a makeshift pen and the berry juice but is shown to fail when we see his facial reaction and chucking the ink pot off the table in frustration.