Romantic Film Openings

For our film opening we chose to do romance , we chose two film openings, one was obviously shown as a romance and the other one was not as obvious we decided to show both sides of the romance genre as we will be portraying both sides in our opening.




The Notebook

The opening shot is a sunrise image over a lake in which a title appears with what we assume is the main or one of the main characters, the titles are small and in white basic font at the bottom of the screen this works well as it does not distract the viewers from the shot. The shots then continue throughout the opening with the sun rising and calm music which sets the mood and hints the genre.
We are shown a shot of someone who we presume is a man in a boat rowing along this lake the slow movements of the rowing compliment the music and setting to intensify the genre, this also creates enigma as we want to know who this person is? and why is he rowing at such an early time in the morning? Good use of props , symbolise and setting are used in the opening as for one we can tell the boat will be used throughout but also there are birds flying calming around towards a white house which contrasts with the darkness of the early morning and we can tell this three things are going to be brought up later in the film to help make the plot.


The pink/red colour of sunrise shows elements of sunrise , there is no diegetic sound used at all in the opening which compliments the fact that its early and no one should be awake however we have already seen a man and now the shot changes to the side of a woman's face looking at the lake and the sunrise arguing the question why are both these people awake ? Which gives us the impression they're going to meet later in the film or they already have therefore portraying the idea of love.






Dear John

In the start we see a man in a army uniform who we presume has just been shot and a voice over of him saying the words 'do you wanna know the first thing on my mind when i got shot? - coins' he carries on talking about coins, the shot transition to a little boy looking at coins falling continues to show how coins are made and talking about his childhood, this creates enigma as we don't quite understand how coins are relevant, the music is understated its calming and quiet and is drowned out by the voice over complimenting the idea that the character is blacking out and he would slowly be only able to hear the voice in his head.

The shot transitions back to the army and we start slowing moving into to a close up of the mans face he then says 'do you wanna know the last thing i thought about after i got shot ? - you.' after he says this the screen goes black as if he's passed out , this shows its a love story as clearly he is talking about someone he loves , although it is not evidently obvious at the start as it appears as an action film but the end creates this romantic enigma of who is 'you' ?