Establishing Shots

The establishing shot is usually only a few seconds long, takes place at the beginning of a film, and is generally demonstrated with a medium or long shot. The establishing shot in any type of media is believed to be a fundamentally important part as it sets up a scene/setting for the audience and is usually a wide or distant shot which informs them on the situation, the location and surroundings of the upcoming text. It is also sometimes used to introduce certain characters or symbols which have little to no meaning to the viewer whatsoever, however these usually appear throughout the text and the importance of these is usually made clearer whilst it is being consumed. Recently, establishing shots have been in decline, a major reason for this is to avoid losing tension in mysterious texts, where they try to obscure a scene and characters to make them come across as they are something else to what they really are, thus skipping the establishing shot to avoid any type of clarification to the viewers. 

Alfred Hitchcock's film 'Psycho' (1960) was one of the first major thrillers and turned into the basis of which all thrillers followed. At the beginning of the film, Hitchcock incorporated the credits and did so in such a way that made the audience wonder about the upcoming film. For the text he used three colours, black, grey and white. These three colours where separated and came together using a 'jagged' effect, almost portraying the split personalities of the character all merge into one, adding mystery in the viewers mind even before the film has begun. When the title of the film comes onto the screen the 'jagged' effect is more abrupt and harsh, illustrating that the film that is about to be watched has many twists and turns and this is done to make the audience feel uneasy and make them more curious to what the film entails.

The use of the vertical lines within the credits is incorporated into introducing the first scene, the establishing shot. In this particular film, the establishing shot is an extreme long-shot of a highly industrialised city which is at a slight high angle. This shot is used in many thrillers and is done so to familiarise the audience to the overall settings and surroundings of the film. After the abrupt and harsh portrayal of the title of the film, showing the establishing shot in a high-angle shows that the city is somewhat vulnerable, and the use of this portrayal encourages the viewers imagination to start making assumptions to what is going to take place within this film.

We have decided to use a fairly similar start to the thriller we are going to compose in our main task. We have taken the element of beginning credits from Alfred Hitchcock, but have decided to use a symbol as our establishing shot instead of having a long shot of the setting or surroundings. We decided to start our thriller with an alarm clock slowly ticking until the morning alarm is activated, instead of the usual surrounding long shot, as the time is going to be a reoccurring theme throughout our thriller; to increase tension and give the viewers the ongoing impression that time is quickly running out. I believe that using a concept rather than a location is more effective as it can be portrayed into many different ways depending on the audience consuming it.