Research and Planning 6: Our chosen genre and how we plan to connote this

Our chosen genre for our film is Action, with our sub-genre being Thriller. We have chosen to work with these genres as they have a very wide appeal and there is a good range of exciting and intense stories you can tell in an action film. Furthermore, these genres are ones that we were quite eager to work with, as all three of us in our group enjoy action films. Recently released action films that have been successful have had quite gritty or thought-provoking themes, such as 'American Sniper' and 'Lucy'. These types of films have also been successful in previous decades, with examples including Casino Royale (2006) and The Usual Suspects (1995). The major difference between our film opening and these examples of mainstream films is that the setting of our opening sequence will appear more abstract. However, an abstract look has been used before in successful mainstream films:

In order to create a successful film, our chosen genre must be obvious to the audience. To make our genre clear, we included an action scene at the end of our opening sequence. The scene will denote a stand-off in which the criminals will pull out a gun on our two main characters. This event is the climax of our opening sequence, so before this stand-off we will aim to build up tension through music and dialogue. Our setting will also create tension as the dark background isolates the characters. The setting of The Usual Suspect's opening scene was similar as it was made to be very dark to keep the identity of a character ambiguous.

As would be expected of an action film, our opening sequence will end with a short action sequence. The focus of our film is the story rather than the action and special effects so we will only use special effects for gunshots. An example of one of our influences for the end of our opening scene is Se7en (1995) as the action scene is trigged through key events in the story rather than for escapism alone. Although we will have special effects to offer escapism, the purpose of the action scene at the end of our opening is to foreground the story as a significant element of our film.