Conventions Of Film Openings

These are the basic conventions of a film opening/opening credits:

1. The studio company logo that produced the film, e.g. Disney or Pixar.

2. Titles (names of cast and producers), usually lasting 5 or 6 seconds each.

3. Music establishing the genre, e.g. happy and upbeat for comedies or romance, suspensful and slow for horros or thrillers.

4. Introducing the characters one by one usually, showing the relationships between them and also introducing the actor's names in a title sequence as each character is shown.

5. The scenes and what happens in the opening scene determines the genre, e.g. an action scene for an action movie, or a creepy scene for a horror.

6. An enigma, so they're already starting to try and puzzle out the film. e.g. a quick scene of a weapon covered in blood, the audience will be wondering what happened.

7. An establishing shot, to set out the location of the film, e.g. the opening scene of Friends clearly shows it's set in New York.

8. The timings of each title range from 3-5 seconds, generally.

example of Friend's opening scene shown below. 

image used