Donnie Darko research on opening

Donnie Darko presents a mysterious opening using the strong thriller conventions of dark lighting, deep chilling sounds and long opening scenes to create an enigma about the story and the characters. As like Momento, there is strong sense of intrigue around the beginning setting and the situation that the character is in. This is portrayed through dark mountainous area a wide shot is looking over on. There is then a contrast in scenery as after a blacked out flash of the opening titles, the main character is seen to be riding his bike again but to a suburban area. This creates a sense of intrigue and captures the audience’s attention right from the beginning.

           

There is also deep emotive non-diagetic sound used to create a similar effect. The opening begins with almost a pathetic fallacy of thunder sounds giving the scene a dark mood. Then there are deep base sounds that underlie the opening music sequence, which is interrupted with a higher pitched piano melody and semi-angelic voices. When the two are together it suggests that Donnie could have a secret or has something wrong with him, as the piece of music is quite disturbing. This is a technique we could use in our opening, making the music a statement about her disturbing tendency of having a split personality. However, to also keep the upbeat tone that comes with the comedy brief from our questionnaire, we could also use the latter faster paced sound of the music when he’s in the brighter suburban area, to attend to that part of the brief.

The camera uses mostly panning and tracking shots to create a sense of an enigma around the character. There is more intrigue implied than suspense used at the very beginning. There is also the technique of using slow motion to draw attention to certain things in the scene, such as when a young girl was bouncing on the trampoline. This not only creates a sense of hysteria, a convention often used in thrillers but could also be used in our opening to draw attention to certain objects that hold meaning such as when it comes to the main characters computer of when the guy that she is imagining shows up. These small hints could imply a lot about our character toward the audience by using this technique.

Another technique often used in most thrillers is the use of side lighting. This mise-en-scene technique is used in American Psycho, Momento and Donnie Darko when Donnie stands facing out of the camera just before the transition back to the suburban neighbourhood. This suggests he has a split personality and works very well with the disturbing sound to create an overwhelming sense that something is defiantly wrong with him. This is defiantly a technique we should use our opening to imply our character is slightly deranged also. The bare foot, pyjama wearing teenager similarly creates the idea that something is defiantly odd about him and the situation he is found in on the floor on a mountain top. This then draws in the audience and appeals to the teenage market because of the characters lifestyle.

All of these conventions then imply that there is something wrong with Donnie implicitly and creates intrigue and mystery; all the things we would like to feature in our opening, all while appealing to a teenage market and making it believable as a thriller.