I decided to do a little more research on another movie to see what sort of editing techniques would fit best with the genre we want. I looked into the movie Seven , which is a drama, crime, and mystery film. This perfectly fits the feel we want for our film, so using the editing techniques they have will be beneficial when I get to the editing portion of our film. My media instructor insisted that I look into it, and I feel I have to listen to him sometimes, ergo, this analysis of the opening sequence opening.
The first thing that catches my eye is the fast paced editing the editors implements into this opening. We really don’t want a fast paced sort of opening, since we wanted that Cozy Mystery type of feeling. Something cozy wouldn’t particularly fast. They used a lot of inserts and cutaways, and arguably jumpcuts. Ellipses were used I believe, but since the audience doesn’t really know what’s going on, it can’t really be determined what’s happening or what time period this is taking place in. It could also involve forms of parallel editing or crosscutting, but again the audience doesn’t know for sure. This could arguably be the goal of a mystery film to confuse the audience or lead them astray, but it’s annoying to analyze cause I have no idea what’s going on. If Cambridge puts this opening on the exam I’m gonna cry.
Another thing I’ve noticed is the superimpositions and overlays upon all of the scenes together. They’re faded on top of one another to show multiple things happening at once. We don’t want exactly a sort of “overlay” but a dissolve from one piece of evidence to another to show a sort of mysterious aura surrounding the pieces of evidence and what might’ve really happened between the murderer and the victim. Though, it couldn’t hurt to try something along those lines with some superimpositions and overlays.
I also noticed the titles were pretty shaky and gave off more of a thriller vibe than the more mysterious vibe we are going for. They were appear on a completely black screen at the edge of the frame to draw the audiences attention to that part of the frame. We don’t want to go with something as creepy as that, but more as a simple addition to the opening sequence of mystery and confusion. They might just fade in and fade out within the scenes shown rather than have their own screens that way.
From seeing this opening, I’ve seen a few new techniques I can try when editing my final and making it the best that it can be. So all in all, I don’t know what my instructor was thinking when he said this opening was like my own but, it’s fine.
Into The Truth 