Documentary, thriller openings and importance of audience

On our first Monday back from, Christmas holidays we was back in to class and down to work, where we watched a documentary about films openings with the does and don’ts. We were also given a handout with questions on the documentary called “Watching”.

Throughout the documentary we was told to answer the questions on the sheet as the many people talked out what makes a good opening. The first question on the sheet says what did Thomas Sutcliffe mean when he says: “films need to seduce their audience into long term commitment. While there are many types of seduction, the temptation to go for instant arousal is almost irresistible.” This was one of the 8 questions that were put in front of us. My answer to this question was as followed, “In my opinion I think that Thomas Sutcliffe means that the audience needs to be sucked into the movie from the very beginning to have them stay for the duration of the whole film.”

The second question, questions the first because it said according to the director jean Jacques Beineix, what are the risk of instant arousal? I wrote that according to the director jean Jacques Beineix the risk of instant arousal is that the audience will be aroused to the highest point and will need a constant arousal to keep them committed to the film.

Another person said in the documentary that a good beginning must make the audience feel that it doesn’t know nearly enough yet, and at the same time make sure that the audience doesn’t know too little.

Once we the documentary had finished we moved on to watch other students thriller openings from the last years classes. We were shown about 5 thriller openings which showed us the different sort of thriller openings we could do, giving us ideas of how much we needed to do to get a good grade and ideas of how to structure our own thriller when it comes to it.

The last part of the lesson we given a handout called Thriller films & audience, which had statistics and questions on the audience. The statistics were on which gender went to watch film in 2007. The tables showed that the majority of action films watch in the cinema were male, such films and 300, Transformer and a few more. The tables also showed which films females watched more than male and what films shared the same amount of viewings. The handout also stressed the importance of the audience.