Opening 5 minutes to a film in my genre – Inception

Inception is a film, which is in the genre we are currently studying for a final 2-minute film opening. After I watched the first 5 minutes of Inception I immediately saw different ways in which they made the film more interesting to the audience by grabbing their attention using different techniques.

The opening scene is on a beach with medium and close up shots of the waves htting the coastal rocks, this doesn’t show much in terms of location but shows that the location may be somewhere tropical.

The next shot is of what the audience would associate as the “main character” laying face down in the water, which suggests he washed up on the shore and is enhanced by the diegetic sound of the waves. This possibly shows us the opening sequence of the film is either a back story or a insight into the future of the film, there are quite a few examples of this and in most cases it proves effective. It does this by making us try and guess what happened to him or what is going to happen to him, which keeps us interested.

The next significant shot shows children playing in the sand and do typical things such as building sand castles, this usually suggests that the area is happy and safe but is contradicting the fact someone has washed up on the shore. The cuts in this scene are spaced out, which helps the slow tempo non-diegetic sound, which is playing in the background help to emphasise that the mood is calm and could well possibly mean the main character is disorientated, due to previous events.

The camera then cuts to a gun which is held against the mans back as he is laying down, this indicated that he is in trouble. This sudden change of events has created a different mood in which confuses the audience and has them wanting answers such as the significance of the children and the man.

The music in the background has changed slightly to more of a subtle tone as a shot of the soldier revealing who the character is, reinforces the fact the character may be in trouble.

The main character had a pistol which was revealed by the soldier shows us that his character is slightly developing as we find out new things.

These things leaves the audience questioning what is happening and what will happen, this ultimately keeps the audience interested and is something we need to consider in our coursework piece.

The opening of this film plays a lot on the mind of what’s going on as the audience need to think hard all the way throughout by taking in all information which is given to them in the first 5 minutes. This is a psychological thriller as it shows all of the key techniques in the opening to be a part of the genre I want to make ‘Black Out’ fit into along with Jamie, Sam and George, making Inception an appropriate film to relate to.