Where to begin...?

 I just want to start off by saying I love films. Movies, films, shows, etc, will always hold a spot in my heart. The thought of having to create an opening scene for a film from scratch overwhelms me. There are so many things that I need to think about like what genre I want to do, what target audience I will choose, what I want the story to be, if the story is too basic, if the story is well defined in just 2 minutes, etc. In comparison to many other great films, it would be hard to come up with a good film opening.

 So, the first thing that I decided to do was to watch a bunch of film openings. A lot of them looked the same. Some of them looked doable like the opening for The Silence of the Lambs which had a bunch of shots of a woman running in the woods, but others would be too hard to do like the opening for Forrest Gump which follows a feather that perfectly lands on a man's foot. I want to create something that relies more on the shots and lighting than the editing. Although I have a lot of experience with editing, I want to make something seem as realistic as possible, and I may not be able to do that with just editing.

Some of the openings that stuck out to me were from Se7en, Smile, and The Invisible Man. They all gave me a sense of clarity about what the movie would be like. And there is one important thing that these movies have in common... their genre! These 3 movies that stuck out to me are all psychological thrillers. 

This coincidence left me no choice but to choose the genre of psychological thriller for my film opening. I also admire the genre because of the number of great movies it holds. Without even realizing it, most of the movies and shows that I watch in my free time are psychological thrillers. This also helps me since it is the genre I am most knowledgeable in. Even though I am familiar with the genre, I need to research everything that I need to know about psychological thrillers to be completely sure about the genre I am choosing.

Stay tuned to see if a psychological thriller opening will be the one for me...!