Comparison of Se7en, One Hour Photo and The Day of the Jackal.

Date: 26/01/09

We saw three openings of thriller films and analysed mainly the camerawork, these openings were each very different, except the fact that they had long takes and were opening sequences.

Se7en started off with very low key lighting, just three of four lamps lighting up a dull room. There is then a close up of the man putting his glasses on the table, this gives the audience the idea of intelligence. The diagetic sound of a metronome, over the almost silence, gives a sense of time passing, tension and it also has the beat of a heartbeat. This scene is mostly made up of close ups and a few long takes. It the goes on to the title sequence where the font is made to look like handwriting, however it flashes and jumps. There are a lot of short cuts of photos and handwriting, and we also see that he shaves the tops of his fingertips off suggesting that he plans to commit, or has commited some kind of high end crime, at this point the audience is suspicious of this person and it gets them guessing from here.
However in One hour photo, the opening sequence is quite short with one very long take of a high tech camera, although it is not obvious what it is until it flashes. The silence over the shot of the camera and the slight zooming in makes the audience feel nervous, then the flash surprises them.
The oldest of these three films, The Day of the Jackal, also has quite a short opening sequence in which there is a lot of tracking, especially following what we suspect to be important people in their cars. The title of the film then suddenly appears over the top of the scene which could surprise the audience.