Friday the 13th opening sequence

Even though these films are not in our genre I chose it because i thought that this film was best to analyse.


Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th starts of in some sort of camp, there’s a girl running and screaming quite hysterically through what looks like a forest. The mood is set by rain, lightning and an upbeat music. Straight away we are led to believe that the girl is in trouble, the reason for that is the surroundings and the way girl is acting. Opening sequence consists of series of cuts, between credits and a sequence itself. In my opinion this technique was used quite wisely because it doesn’t get the audience bored with watching a girl run all the time, the cut goes from a scene to a name on the screen and after a name appears and the camera goes back to the scene the girl proceeds a bit further each time. This keeps the audience on their toes and gives that little sense of edginess. After a while of running the girl gets tackled by a much older woman, she then explains that she will be punished for what she done to Jason, so as we can see a snare was used in this sequence, because at the beginning the girl was positioned as a victim and she’s shown as a perpetrator. We then find out that the older lady is Jason’s mother, after a short conversation the girl “slays” the mother and runs away. In this particular sequence a Hermeneutic Code was used, reason for this is that the it is not fully or clearly explained to us what exactly is going on, all we now is that someone drowned and someone’s has to pay for it. We don’t know the story behind the whole incident, the audience’s view on the young girl changes while she confronts the mother. We only get partial answers on what is going on
The other code that was used was a proairetic code, it was used to start off a movie, Jason drowns mother wants revenge, a girl kills the mother someone else just has to happen further into the movie. Shortly after mother’s death we see someone pick up her necklace and a machete, and a voice comes on in the background. Because of this voice our view on the whole scene is changed again, the mother is now represented as being a evil puppet master who orders someone to kill for her. Throughout the sequence the audience is kept on the edge of their seats, they want answers which will be given to them as the movie proceeds, because of that the director kept the audience interested in the film. And from what we see in the opening sequence we are guaranteed to see more twists and turns throughout the film.

Evaluation of the preliminary sequence

First of all we had to draw up storyboards and think of our scripts and camera shots. We had to be especially careful about camera shots, the reason for that was we had to fulfil the criteria given to us by our teacher.

After finalizing the first step we had to think of finding a suitable room to film it in, the room we went for was a business studies. The reason we chose this room was that it was a perfect location for our production, the location was exactly what we were looking for, the corridor outside was perfect for our opening shot.

When it comes to equipment we have used two camcorders and Apple’s MacBook Pros. We used Final Cut to edit our movie. Final cut is a great piece of software but at this stage there’s still a lot more we have to learn on how to use it, but our teacher posted some tutorials on his blog so it won’t be as difficult as it could be.

What went well? Well we executed the movie exactly the way we planned to. The difficulties were that it wasn’t as easy to find the room, we didn’t really thoroughly planned all the shots.

Overall I think that the project went well, however we didn’t really execute the shot with the profession that was expected from us, we broke a 180 degree rule, we didn’t really get and action match and in one part of a film there’s was a third person visible when it shouldn’t be.

We would definitely re-film the whole think and think of what we’re doing more. That’s the only improvement I would suggest

When we will film our main task we will think of camera shots more carefully because they are the key for the success, and also we would put much more time in planning it e.g. story boards, scripts and dialogues.