Analysis of previous students work!

I'm going to analyse a thriller opening made by three students who are now in the year above me, their thriller is called 'The Killers Kiss' and I'm going to be highlighting some strengths and weaknesses, and seeing how we could avoid the weaknesses and use their strengths in our thriller!
Here's the clip:




Strengths:
* The music fits really well with the opening, the chosen music adds suspense and tension right from the beginning of the clip. It starts as soon as the clip begins, meaning you notice it right away and notice it throughout the clip. We can make sure our music fits with our thriller opening, and one note I will definitely take from this opening is to start the music when we want it to start becoming tense.
* The credits are integrated brilliantly in this opening, they are spread out between the shots of the actual film which I thought added suspense between each shot - we could think about doing this with our film.
* The lighting used in this opening is all natural which makes it seem more realistic for the audience - we should take note of this and perhaps think about the lighting we use in ours to make it realistic. Also the use of candle light is brilliant, it seems to be an enigmatic code in this opening as there are so many candles - however they are used a light source making the antagonist look mysterious and evil.
* The choice of costumes was realistic and therefore hooked the audience in more and made the opening believable. Dark was used for the antagonist and contrastingly light colours were worn by the protagonist.
* The continuity was brilliant in this thriller opening, I didn't notice any point where it didn't work.

Weaknesses:
* The film was extremely short, and I think if it was longer they would have been able to fit in a wider range of camera angles and movements, and also perhaps made it more tense for the audience by putting in more information about the characters. - I feel our film has a huge range of different camera angles and shots, and also we have figured out how long each shot will be and it comes to about 3 minutes.
* I think the antagonist and protagonist could have been made clearer through camera angles and different shots on them, as it did take me a while to figure out that the female was definitely the antagonist. - We should make sure we clearly show the antagonist and protagonist from the first time that we meet them to make it clear for the audience how they should feel about certain characters.
* I noticed that the slow motion shot is quite pixelated making it difficult for the watcher to focus on exactly who is running in the shot and therefore are unable to make a judgement on whats going on in the scene. - To make sure this doesn't happen to us we should shoot each shot a few times to assure we have perfect shots.
* One other thing I would have liked to see in this opening is perhaps another scene of the 2 main characters so that we know exactly what their relationship is - concluding in the audience making more of a harsh judgement on the antagonist. - To make sure this doesn't happen in our film we should make it obvious the realionships between all characters.

I think this is a really good opening of a thriller and I will definitely be trying to achieve the effect that they had with the music in our film, and also I really loved the fact that they used all natural lighting and the use of candles!

:D:D:D