Plot Summary (spoilers)

When thinking of the plot to our own thriller opening, it was important that we try to stick to the guidelines and conventions of the thriller genre in order to make our opening successful. First of all, the opening consists of a chase between two unknown characters. This lack of clear narrative as well as not conforming to Todorov's narrative theory of beginning with equilibrium will excite our audience as they are thrown straight into the action and are clearly shown that this film will not conform to basic film conventions and will instead be a challenging, exciting thriller which is what they have come to see.  We chose to involve a pursuit as a chase is usually very dramatic which is one of the main thriller conventions. The first character we are introduced to is the one who is being chased, he is shown to be holding a bag. In the entire opening, we make sure not to give the audience nearly any information or background on any of the characters, this leaves the audience second guessing and does not leave them with a clear protagonist-antagonist situation which would usually be found in most films.


 We made sure the audience never sees the contents of this bag as we wanted to add a sense of mystery, even in a shot where we show the first character's pursuer actually opening the bag, we do a low-angled shot so we can only see the reaction of the character. As the pursuer closes in on who he is chasing we deliberately chose a slow tracking shot of the pursuer coming towards the camera as he looks for his target, this is to add suspense to the scene in order to again link with the standard and most important thriller convention. Also, when the chaser goes over to the changing rooms in pursuit of the runner, we deliberately choose to keep the camera at a position where the bag, although not being involved int he action, is still in shot. This suggests that the contents of this bag is still of some significance to the following events.


Finally, when the camera pans across to one of the victims of the target the pursuer slowly approaches only for the character being chased to come from behind to attack him. Although we do show the attacker approaching the pursuer we make sure not to show the actual attack, this technique was similarly used in Alfred Hitchcock's famous thriller masterpiece 'Psycho'. As well as copying this method from 'Psycho' one of the final shots of the opening is that of a drain with supposed blood draining into it, this is to leave the opening on a suitable climax and relieve the audiences suspense and tension.