Final Cut Comparison Part 2

Pick out two opening sequences from films in your genre. Then you will compare your final product to this professional product. Write 7-10 sentences in each post about how your product is similar to this one and how it differs. Explain the differences and discuss the reasoning for the differences (time, budget, quality, etc.).

Due to being unable to find a full seamless video on the opening sequence, these are two videos that are apart of the same sequence but posted by two different YouTube users in two separate videos.

Brick - Film Opening (part 1)
Brick (2005) - Opening Scene (part 2)

In this Opening Sequence from the 2005 film Brick by filmmaker Rian Johnson (before his days of Knives Out films), the opening sequence provides context of high schooler Brendan Frye discovering a dead person's body (who is his ex-girlfriend), before the film flashes back to events two days prior where the main character receives a phone call from a person who is in danger at a phone booth in the street. A black vehicle passes by and drops a lit cigarette as some sort of sign, which attracts the attention of Frye as the scene ends. This opening sequence is similar to mine where the approach is grounded in a mystery that a high school setting of characters in high school, whose life is normal until it is upended by a mystery that they have stumbled upon. The approach and vision in both my opening sequence and Brick is centered around independent filmmaking, as Johnson was not working with a big studio for this film and was filmed using his local locations and a limited budget of only $450,000 compared to major studios and such films having budgets that are much larger than this figure, while my opening sequence was created without cost and used the available human and surrounding assets available. Brick's opening sequence evokes a sense of simplicity with the emphasis on close ups of the character and a dead body, along with soundtrack music that adds to the film's meaning of a deepening mystery, where cuts on each soundtrack beat adds to a heavy sense of emotion (mournful) that is setting in for Frye as he sits over and observes the dead body near the sewer. In contrast, soundtrack music used in my opening sequence is primarily intended for ambience, adding to suspicion, and a deepening mystery, but I do not use music in the in-depth manner that Johnson uses in Brick, which attributes to his personal vision and arguably more experience/knowledge (despite this being his first feature film) in filmmaking compared to mine. My opening sequence and Brick also relies on the idea of communication using phones for delivering and understanding important context in text messages and a phone call respectively to deliver suspense and drama, which reflects the high school experience of teenagers (the difference being Brick was produced in the mid 2000s and text messages/smartphone technology was not present/widespread at the time, an element that I use in my opening sequence to help convey meaning). Brick was shot on 35mm film, while my opening sequence was shot using a digital camera on my mobile device, but both opening sequences still retain the essence of independent filmmaking with a similar vision of grounded mysteries and teenagers. My opening sequence relies more on continuity in a runtime span of two minutes, while Brick uses a flashback to two days prior for context that leads to the dead body an audience immediately sees as that opening sequence starts. This also represents a similar vision in immediately showing the mystery that a character has to solve in both Brick and my opening sequence, but the approach differs through creative vision and intent of myself and Johnson on how the buildup to the mystery occurs and the tension is released.