Research - How can a film opening attract an audience?

"A good beginning must make the audience feel that it doesn't know nearly enough yet, and at the same time make sure that it doesn't know too little". That's also true because the beginning of the film is deceptively difficult because you are not just establishing characters, not just a story but you are establishing the tone, and the audience is making a very early adjustment to what this film is giving - are they supposed to laugh, supposed to be serious, whats the nature of this, how engagement am I going to be, establishing many things at once. 

The reason why Kyle Cooper's sequence to the film Seven is effective is that the title sequence became the first scene of the film in many ways , it told the story and it introduced you to the nature of the film's main character, it foreshadowed a lot of the things that were going to happen. 

While creating the opening of the film "A touch of evil", Orson Welles intended to make it without seeing any credits and without a title music. He wanted to plunge his audience into the story without giving them time to prepare themselves. However, the studio was far more courteous. They put a nice score underneath it and the credits so that the actual effect was lost, and the reason for that was because they didn't understand the opening shot as they didn't understand the picture itself. 



The meaning behing 'a favourite trick of Film Noir' is that when the beginning of the film is actually its ending, not beginning at all and many film producers has used this technique. 

The opening of the film "The Shining" creates suspense because the camera persues the car exactly like a predator - high up and from behind. In fact, everything about the opening tells the audience that these people are travelling in the wrong direction. 


One of the nicest things about the beginning of a film is when the audience says "I don't understand everything but I want to know more about it".