Film Opening Scene Charts

HALLOWEEN INTERPRETATION 

This is a chart made after watching the opening clip to the film 'Halloween'. The top line shows the different diegetic and non-diegetic sounds made in the clip and the bottom lines shows the intensity of different scenes. When the line goes higher that means the sound was louder and there are illustrated images that show dramatic scenes that I remembered throughout the opening. The music began very quiet and low and as the boy named Michael walked into the house, the music became louder and more mysterious and intense and when he stabs the lady the sound is very loud as the lady is screaming and the boy is breathing very heavily. The top line matches the images in time for example, as you can see, when the boy and girl are kissing down stairs the noise is very quiet, but when the women in dead on the floor with blood all over her, the sound is powerful and there is a lot of diegetic and non-diegetic sound together.

AMELIE INTERPRETATION

This is a chart to the opening scene of the film 'Amelie'. As you can see from the top sound chart, at the beginning of clip, the sound is very constant and was a fairly quiet traditional French tune to clearly portray the location of the film. There is then French narrative and as this is happening, the music goes much quieter. Then there is a loud noise of car, and on the bottom chart which shows the important scenes, you can see that as the noise of the car occurs, the picture shows a low angle shot of a street and a car drives through the street and splashes through a puddle. The music then returns to being very gentle with French voice overs. The scenes constantly change. There is first and table outside when it is very windy, it then changes to chromosomes and then to Amelie herself being born. Then, after Amelie is born the music is more upbeat and is a gentle piano tune and scenes such as dominoes falling down and coins spinning.

TRAINSPOTTING INTERPRETATION

This is a chart to part of the opening scene of the film 'Trainspotting'. This clip involved very different sounds compared to the other two films. The beginning clip shows a low angle of a modern English street and there are boys running. There is very upbeat music to illustrate that there is a lot of action. As the boy is running he runs into the road and gets hit by a car slightly. The sound changes here as the car brakes make a very loud noise. There is also some diegetic sound in this scene as the boy who gets hit starts shouting and then laughs and keeps running. After this, there are voice overs throughout and the scenes change from the boy smoking heroine to him and his friends all playing football together. There is diegetic sound then when the boys are shouting for the ball and when the boy is hit by the football in his face. The final scene is the boy smoking heroine again and then falls to the fall. The bang as he falls to the floor is very dramatic and adds effect.

Theories

In class, these are the different theories that we have studied:

• The Effects theory: This theory studies the way that media can effect society and how society can effect media. It was proposed by the Frankfurt school in the 1920's from people's reaction to Nazi propaganda. The Hypodermic syringe indicates that media is like a drug that is given to people and is addictive.

• Uses and gratifications theory:

• Stuart Hall - Encoding/Decoding: This is how media messages are produced, circulated and consumed. Hall argued that the message is not fixed by the sender and that the receiver doesn't always know the interpretations of the message so make up what they think and sometimes misread the message.

• The Male Gaze:Laura Mulvey introduced the Male Gaze is 1975. She believes that in film, audiences have to view characters from the perspective of a heterosexual men, presenting women as objects of male pleasure.