Inspiration for the opening titles to our Thriller film

Creating the opening titles to a film (and particularly for a Thriller film) is an art form in of itself.
Part of the reason for this is that it allows the directors to be really creative with the effects that they want put across to the audience - it could be used to ease the audience into the film with a hint of tension or it could be designed to calm the audience down a little if the opening scene is particularly tense.
Another reason why the opening credits are so important is because it would be one of the very first things that the audience and so the style by which these are done hints at the style of the film as a whole.
The opening titles in our Thriller film are inspired by a combination of those used in the Thriller film Se7en and the ITV drama series Lewis and Endeavour (and likely Morse as well).
In Se7en (see video right) the opening shows a character (who at this point in time is left in the shadows) who is meticulously planning something and making many notes - seeing as this is a crime Thriller we can assume that this is the murderer plotting the acts which he is about to commit. The music is edgy in a why that connotes a destabilised mental state for the character involved. The meticulous nature of the planning for these acts also brings across a sense of OCD, and the fact that we know that the killer is basing his acts on the 7 deadly sins (as revealed in the synopsis) we can almost describe this as a sense of religious zeal to the character. We liked the way in which the titles were done - by showing bits of work from the character followed quickly by a fade in which it would show the next name in the list. As Anna also has a destabilised mental state, this kind of style would suit her character well too.
In each episode of Endeavour/Lewis, the style is very similar in how it opens in that the audience is shown snippets of characters performing different actions followed by a title coming onto the screen which allows the audience to get a feel for what the general themes are for that episode and who all of the main suspects are. Again, the style of credits is one that we felt we liked to it was one that we decided to adopt for our own Thriller film.