From the results of my questionnaire, I feel that it is important to delve further into the film opening of Sin City to see if I can make some parallels between our opening and the film without copying it. Though I briefly touched on the components of the film opening alot earlier in my blog, now I feel that is important to go into alot more detail so I know the conventions of it inside-and-out.
The scene opens with black screen for about 3 seconds, with the music already playing- this creates a smoother effect, rather than jumping straight into the scene- it then fades to a gloomy establishing shot, the whole scene is in black and white- except a woman's red dress. The establishing shot is tilted slightly down, making the woman appear to be quite vunerable We immediately hear a male voiceover, that is extremely cliche, a common convention of film noir. She stands looking out on the city, and we see the owner of the voice over enter the scene.
This man is known as the 'Salesman' and he more or less dictates the scene via the means of a voiceover, the actual spoken dialogue comes second to what is going on in his head. This suggest that the Salesman has the upper hand in the scene and is the more dominant of the two characters. I think that this is one of the best conventions of the Film Noir genre as a voice over is an excellent way of presenting the status of characters to the audience and introducing them as well.
The woman and the Salesman exchange words in an over-the-shoulder shot, tilting slightly down to the woman. Once again, this emphasises her vulnerability as a woman and the OTS once again helps us see from the Salesman's prospective. The two characters kiss, and the camera zooms out to a long shot and the effect changes to a comic book style- the contrast turned up so high that the two characters look like cartoons. The scene returns back to normal on a mid-shot of the woman with her arms around the Salesman, we can't see his face- so it makes us as an audience extremely uneasy about what is about to happen next.
The camera eventually tilts up to his face, and focusses there- but even then he is in more or less, complete shadow. He kisses her, and she snuggles into him affectionately. However a few frames later we hear a strange noise, she screen flashes and she immediately collapses onto his chest. The voiceover then tells us that he has just killed her with a silenced gun. The scene finishes on an aerial shot of him holding her as the rain pours down, giving a sense of omniscience and a sense of judgement of actions right and wrong, which is especially appropriate as someone has just been murdered.
Via the means of special effects, the camera zooms out and around all the sky line of the city until there is a complete birds eye view of the skyscrapers. Match-on-action is then used to fade the buildings in 'SIN CITY', the first title shot of the film.
I really like the idea of presenting a situation, then using a title shot rather than the other way around- as this is a rather typical way of opening romantic comedies or family films. A voice over will definitely need to be used as it is such a common convention in both Film Noir and the Neo Noir revival. It's also quite important to have a mix of male and female characters- as a female 'softens' Film Noir, making it quite stylish and slick- if male characters dominate the scene we risk it looking too gritty!
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