Evaluation - Setting Up the Story

One of the key features of a good opening two minutes is how well it sets up the rest of the story, and how much it makes the audience want to carry on watching. Our ultimate aim was to produce a professional looking opening two minutes that makes the audience want to carry on watching until the end of the film. In this post I will be particularly focusing on the second of those two points, however the first one is relevant to this as well.

A widely used tactic of dragging an audience into the plot is the establishment of enigmas. The clever thing about creating enigmas is that no matter how bad a film is, if the audience is asking questions about what is going on, then they'll want to carry on watching simply to find out the answer. Audience's hate unanswered questions and if the enigma is strong enough, then they'll sit through an entire film just to get the answer to their question. The infamous Alfred Hitchcock even said that 'an audience would rather be confused than bored'. Enigmas can vary in complexity - some are complex enigmas as to why a character did something, or what is going on, whereas others are simply 'will the guy get the girl', or 'who will win'. In our opening two minutes we opted for the first of these two options, but also included a few aspects of the second option in order to support the first. The main enigmas that we presented were: Who is Agent Davidson, and who is he working with? Who is Jim and why do they want him? Who stopped the mission's success? Why is Davidson running away at the end? Who is the character advancing on Caprivi? As you can see, we established a fair amount of enigmas all of which the audience would want to find out the answers to. The only problem with having so many enigmas is that the audience may be overly confused and get bored because they don't understand what is going on. I think that we managed to avoid this though, as the action was fast paced and we showed the audience a quick fight sequence, which stopped them getting bored.

The fast paced action was definitely something that would pull in the audience. Many of the people that would be going to see our film would be expecting to see fight and chase sequences, so by giving them a taster of this in the opening two minutes we brought that side of the audience straight in. For those in the audience who prefer to watch something sophisticated with a strong plot we gave them this as well. In the opening two minutes we involved several twists and the enigmas aforementioned. These people would understand that the action is necessary to the plotline, and I'm sure that they wouldn't mind it too much. By making our film like this we made sure that the film was enjoyable for a wide audience, and no matter what style they prefer, they should be dragged in by our opening two minutes.

Overall I think that we were highly successful in setting up the story in our opening two minutes and I think that the audience would carry on watching. I asked a few people if they would carry on watching until the end of the film and they all said that they would, which is obviously a good sign. I think that we established some strong enigmas, but also presented a strong action sequence and both worked well together in order to produce a very strong opening two minutes.