Detailed look at the 'Se7en' opening sequence

When looking for an existing opening sequence to dissect, we looked back into our influences to find 'Se7en'. It's of the thriller genre as is our film which is a reason for choosing it. We also looked back at it as we remembered it made extremely good use of the credits and that we especially liked the typography. 

A main reason for doing this is so we can learn about the structure of opening sequences so when it comes to storyboarding and in the future, the filming of our project, we will have a rough idea of the sort of things that we need to include. Another reason for conducting this research is so that we can appreciate the type and number of shots used and also the shot lengths.

Here's a record of all the credits and their times included in the 'Se7en' opening sequence.

The music used sounded like a steady high hat beat with multiple sound effects layered over the top giving it that edge. There were hints of electric guitar from 01:40 till the end of the opening sequence with gritty male vocals coming in at 02:00 and seeing it through till the end. The effect of layering the music up as the sequence progresses causes the audience to concentrate on the various shots, credits and visual effects. 

The typography is very jittery and scatty conveying the thriller genre to a tee. 

Pretty much all of the shots in this opening sequence are close ups or extreme close ups. We did find that the length varied depending on how important that particular credit was. For example, the film's production company 'New Line Cinema' had a shot length of 5 seconds as did the title of the film and the staring roles. However, the credits which had less importance tended to be between 2 and 3 seconds.

It was very hard to count the number of cuts as they are tremendously quick but we ended up with 81 as a rough number. This isn't any where near the average number of cuts in an opening sequence as the average number of cuts for an entire film is 600-700, if 'Se7en' had 81cuts every two minutes they would exceed this amount in the first 20 minutes. 

By doing this research it has opened our eyes to the amount of detail involved in an opening sequence such as 'Se7en'. Using this as a model, we can hopefully come out with an end product that could be of industry standard.