Thriller Planning - Initial Brainstorming and Lesson Discussion

Now I am beginning to start planning for the construction of my own Thriller title sequence. I will be working with Beth, Bethany and Ellie, as they live locally to me and therefore it will be most practical. We began by discussing our ideas that we had previously posted onto our blogs and see what ideas we liked and what ideas we did not like as a group, and then merged them all together to create a basic idea of our storyline for our scene.
The idea as a whole takes the most reference to the "Pursuit" idea I had posted onto my blog, but the details have changed to incorporate our discussed ideas. We incorporated elements of my second idea, "Trapped" and elements of ideas from other people's blogs, such as the young girl from Beth's idea. This allowed us to construct a plot and then a brainstorm of what we would actually do, pictured below.

We first did a vague overview of each of the areas we needed to plan for, including: Plot, storyboarding, a planning edit, locations, costumes/props/objects, characters, casting, soundtrack, equipment and a shooting schedule. We decided which ones we would tackle as a group in lesson and which ones we would individually tackle- the task I gave myself was to construct the plot for the whole film, the plot of the title sequence, character details and profiles and locations.
From the brainstorm we constructed our ideas for what would actually happen in our scene and had many changes. I will post the plot in full in a later post along with a more detialed profile of the important characters but to give the changes some context I will briefly detial them now:

"A detective investigating the strange disappearance of a young girl takes continues to try to solve the case after it is dismissed. Slowly, he is driven to the point of insanity and is a result is dismissed, and all his time is devoted to finding the lost girl. Blaming himself, the man is taunted by the girl everywhere he goes, and must solve the case before the asylum rediscover him and pyschological demons turn his nightmares into his reality."

The plot summary will be subject to change, and I will finalise the plot in a later post, most likely after the next lesson. The characters include a man who was a detective that was driven insane through his guilt of not being able to find the girl, who was abducted 2 years prior to when the film commences. She is portrayed as pyschotic due to the man's pyschological state. The man is taunted and pursued by her, along with a strange paranormal creature we have dubbed "the Shade" who will represent the kidnapper of the girl; he will appear completely black as he was never identified. There are more than one of him in the scene to show how he cannot escape his guilt.

Our class discussions were mainly about the start and end of our sequence. The man was going to encounter the girl in the street at night time, but would not see her face. Originally the man would approach her and try to talk to her, but I was concerned that speech would ruin the effect of the suspense and confusion in the opening scene. Instead, we introduced the idea of the man having flashbacks to show his past and give some context to the scene, notably of pictures of the girl and an old mental asylum in Norwich (detailed in the upper right of our Brainstorm). We also discussed the introduction of the shade and how the detective would react. At first, on our brainstorm, the girl would say, "I'm not my own, he's right over there" or something along those lines. Once again there was the issue of speech, and I thought that the girl should never look at the man to represent how she was never found, so we suggested a strange, creepy pointing action behind the man, where the Shade would stand. The man would then proceed to run and the rest of the scene would ensue, but we also wanted another interaction with the girl before the scene progressed, perhaps the introduction of an object of signifcance, such as in "Inception", to determine whether the man was delusional or if the scene was real, and not a stereotypical "It was a dream" ending.

We also discussed the end of the scene. We knew the man would awaken in a trashed room such as the one described in my idea "Trapped", except it would also have mattresses on the floor and a makeshift private-detective style board on the wall, with pictures and articles pinned together. The scene would focus on objects of significance in the room and then would show writing on the wall; we decided it should be the name of the girl written on the wall which I suggested should be the name of the film. The name of the film is being discussed in class in future and being finalised by another group member. How he got there was the issue we needed to tackle; we knew he would be cornered by the Shades, and ideas were suggested, such as that the man should see his own face on the face of the Shade before awakening, or that the man could stumble, see his face flash, then as he hit the ground the title could be displayed, and then the man wakes up, all in one motion. This could be addressed in the planning edit.

Now we have our basic plan we will adress the different elements of our sequence in more detail, and I will update my blog with the latest discussions, changes, research and finalised details over the next fortnight.