James Post -
Fast & Furious 5
Thriller opening on first 2 minutes




The first piece of dialogue we hear is the name of  one of the main characters, we hear this from  a serious and monotonous man who we soon find out is the judge which is sentencing the man to prison through a small diegetic dialogue. Although we never see the judge we get the sense that this will be final and there will be no possibility of the man being released. The music in the background is erie, suspenseful and dangerous as we hear sudden drops of bass and sounds to resemble a heart sinking. This is until we hear the roar of a V8 Dodge with enhanced engine notes and turbo noises. The music suddenly becomes intense and aggressive, as if something serious is about to happen, it also becomes quite upbeat and fast paced to match the cars. As we cameras focus in on individual cars and there movements, the engine notes and sounds become louder and the music slightly quieter to show of the incredible sounds.

As we can see from this screenshot as the female character grabs and pulls up the handbrake we hear the music and engine notes slightly die down and the clunk of the handbrake is very noticeable, to get the noise of this a foley would have been added. As she spins the car around to do a handbrake turn we hear the scream of burning rubber from the tyres and the sound of the engine quickly accelerating again.

In the screenshot to the right hand side we see that the bus carrying the prisoners has just crashed into one of the high performance vehicles (now behind it just in shot) and has started to roll over and the crashing at high speed. The music immediately stops as the collision occurs and from then on the sounds of the bus crashing are multiple foleys, things such as smashing glass, wheels/tyres bursting, the foleys are used because it is important sound as nothing else is being heard, there is no dialogue in the background, you cannot hear any other cars,
nothing. They used foleys to enhance the
 importance of the destruction and debris.

The opening sequence gives the visual style of a thriller because it includes things such as an enigma, for example when the character who is being detained and being driven off in the bus does he know that he is about to be illegally rescued?

Camera work is very important in the opening to a thriller, this is because they usually follow the same pattern and techniques but they also add unique twists. However at the start the first image we see is of male character 'one' at a medium shot as we can see in the screenshot below, we can tell this is a medium shot because the subject isn't completely in the frame but at the same time he's not so far out of the frame that would make it a long shot or a close up. It is taken at a POV (point of view) angle from what I guess to be the judge who is standing up and giving his verdict. We can also see from this image that they have added additional lighting to the subject, as well as given appropriate clothes which represent and show that he is being detained, he is also in hand cuffs which are shown out of shot.

In this short sequence the editing is slow and predictable with multiple fades which lead onto the two other main characters and then immediately after leading back to main male character one walking along in a line ready to get on the prison bus from a dolly which goes past the actors. There is also a voice over during the fades and other shots. The editing flow works extremely well with the pace of the sequence at the start and then gets progressively faster as the  action unfolds.


This shot is very clever because it gives us a perspective of where the bus is to where the convoy of the drivers are. We see the bus slightly blurred out but still clearly visible, the cars shooting past the camera to get to this place is a very good affect because we get the sense of speed and urgency of what the convoys about to do and theres no way the bus could get away. It is taken from a low angle to give us the sense that we are sitting in a car behind.