Breaking The Fourth Wall

In lesson on Wednesday we researched about some more filming techniques. One of these was a technique called 'breaking the fourth wall' where one of the characters break the imaginary fourth wall and addresses the audience. This can either be talking directly at the audience or just glancing at them for a moment. This helps convey that characters true emotions on the situation and can also be used for dramatic irony; to show the audience that the character feels or knows something that the other characters do not. An example of this is shown below in Miranda Hart's TV sitcom "Miranda" where she uses this technique as an extension of her comedy. In this clip, she breaks the fourth wall three times; first to tell the audience that she's lied to Stevie about her date count and the other two times to express disgust at her mothers party plans and proposition to set her up Edmund Detory. This connects the audience with the characters and most often is used to set up an inside joke that the other characters are unaware of.
My group discussed the use of this in our film opening but because we haven't decided upon our plot or even the genre, we are most likely to do a thriller or horror opening in which, this technique can not be used appropriately thus, we are probably not going to use this.