Making you bored on purpose

 Hi guys it's me Santi
I realized that before scripting my opening I have to look at other openings so that I make sure that I'm not just going insane and making an opening that would actually miss the point! So I spent all of today looking at openings and their respective credit sequences (but that's for another blog).

I looked up "Don't Look Up"

If you're not familiar with "Don't look up" It's basically a disaster movie about a comet that crashes into the earth and everyone dies but with political commentary!
It wasn't good. But, the opening scene was really clever. What I like the most about it is how the entire time nothing is said, it's just music, sound effects, and mumbling from the character on screen as she sings along to a song she's listening to. The point of the opening is to introduce the comet, but we don't know that it's on a collision course for earth, that's revealed later in the movie.
Something I like here is how there's a lot of inserts and close-up shots, I took it as a way to emphasize the nothingness of the moment, until she discovers the comet. In fact, you don't even know where she is until 24 seconds into the scene, the scene starts with just sound of a tea kettle followed by close-ups of her making tea and a sandwich. You can tell she's used to it, going on her science computer to start up her science laser telescope (I don't know how it works), it tells the audience that this is probably a repetitive thing she's done before, so she's uninterested for the most part, something that our character will be doing a lot in my film opening!
The way the film opening was gonna go was that my character would be in a grocery store and you wouldn't know there was a rogue planet in the sky until later, so this helps with figuring out how we could do that with cinematography

Rogue Planet Side Note

Yeah I said rogue planet. We were gonna go for an asteroid first, but then we realized that asteroids were sort of very much so overdone, so we decided to look for other disasters. At first we thought "what if the sun started flickering" but then we realized there were so many limitations with that (I'd have to find a way to use vfx to globally illuminate the entire scene so that it would look realistic). Then we thought of more natural disasters like tsunamis, but the disaster has to happen slowly, something that you know about months before but you can't do anything about it. So we thought "wait what if asteroid but much bigger" and boom! rogue planet!
But more on the story of our opening later...

Melancholia (the planet and the word)

This is an insane film opening, I wanna take a second to actually talk about the movie in general. It has a similar premise to our film opening, about a character who doesn't care about the end of the world, and it had a rogue planet! The opening itself is beautifully made, and you have to watch the film to actually understand what's happening, but some of the takeaways is definitely the look of the planet.

There's such an otherworldly look to the planet, but in an elegant fashion, it's very pretty basically. Me and my team are definitely taking inspiration from this still to create our opening. 
Another thing Melancholia does is show the planet's trajectory. It flies by Earth, before turning around and crashing with it. It gives people plenty of time to see the planet (and their doom) yet it takes a lot of time to actually happen, something that could set up the story pretty well for us.

I'll definitely be looking into this approach when thinking about our opening, hopefully it looks as good as this movie!
Until next time, Santi :)