Original Pitches and Final Idea

Our Original Pitches

Before we came up with our actual film opening idea we got together as a group and came up with two separate film opening ideas.  My group decided up front that we would create a thriller style opening and decided on one opening in which the protagonist was abducted and another POV piece in which the protagonist stalks someone around.  Once we had our two ideas we pitched them to the class, who gave us feedback, which helped influence the features which we kept and ditched for our final opening idea.

Idea 1:

Rough Storyboard of Idea 1

My groups first idea was to make a montage following a young girl through her day. We were going to edit it out of chronological order, including black screens to host our titles and repeating one particular long shot of the protagonist walking down a street.  The opening would begin on a very dark screen with diegetic engine sounds and scared breathing, this breathing would continue both diegetically and non-dietetically, throughout the montage acting as the pieces music, gradually growing faster and building tension, like in this scene from '2001 a Space Odyssey', 1968,  https://youtu.be/-3m-Zu3qgM4.  Parallel to this build in the tension of the sound the clips of the montage would be cut shorter and shorter until it becomes a high speed montage, before stopping to reveal the protagonist being abducted from the road she had previously been shown walking down.
   This opening idea would have a very light and happy tone with a warm, yellow toned, sepia effect colour pallet establishing a safe atmosphere which would be juxtaposed by the openings conclusion.  The montage section would document clips of the life of a normal suburban adolescent girl e.g. talking to her mother and laughing with her friends in school.
    Eventually we decided against the premise of an abduction deciding it could easily become cliche and we wanted to subvert stereotypes.  We also thought that the high speed montage of her and other characters may become difficult to film as it would involve a lot of different actors leaving our group highly vulnerable to bad acting.

Idea 2:

Rough Story board of idea 2 (part 1)

Our second film opening idea had the protagonist being followed/stalked by someone or something, with the sequence being shot in POV from the perspective of the stalker.   The stalkerish nature of the piece would be established from the outset of the opening with the protagonist being filmed, doing normal activities like reading or sitting on the sofa, from outside of their house, much like in the opening scene of 'Halloween', 1978,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF1DCf1ChA.  The protagonist will move through their house to the front door and the camera will follow them around the outside. The camera will then, as the stalker, follow the protagonist down the road from behind a bush, before cutting to a train station.  The station scene would be filmed from the opposite platform documenting a character walking along the platform and

Rough Story board of idea 2 (part 2)

 bumping in to another of the films main characters.  At this point non-diegetic music would begin to play.  Then a train will drive past and as it goes the main character will have disappeared.  The camera will then cut to a close-up of a taxi door closing outside of the station with the taxi taking off and driving away into a long shot in which you can see someone looking out of the back window squinting as though they have noticed something.  The camera will then move into the street in the way of the car so it looks as though the car is going to run it over and just before it does the camera will whip pan backwards cutting to the shot of the protagonist walking down the street watching them turn around to look in the camera/stalker's direction after hearing the rustling of leaves.  The camera will then whip pan back to the car this time behind it watching it screech to a halt.  The credits will be integrated through out this sequence e.g. when the train goes past the film title could be revealed.

  We decided against this idea as it was a very complicated concept and narrative which may have been difficult to relay in 2 minutes. The sequence also required a lot of filming in public which is not easy to do and leaves your piece open to continuity errors and other such issues caused by a lack of control over the filming conditions.

Our Final Idea:

For our final idea we decided take from idea 1 and use a montage to set a pacing for the piece.  The opening will literally revolve around our protagonist with the camera circling around her in a mid shot becoming a motif for our piece.  As the camera circles around her the lighting and coloring will be bright and her surroundings will be calm and safe places like a park or her bedroom.  However, these happy moments will then be interjected by darker shots of her being hurt or hiding etc. revealing the darker themes of the film.  As the opening goes on these scarier scenes will become more and more frequent and it will become apparent that the girl is being abused by a man presumed to be her father and that this abuse has affected her mental state owing to the stark contrasts in the films opening montage. The idea of the girls fading mental health will be furthered by the sound of the piece, with the diegetic sound for the opening being muffled showing the audience her mental isolation isolation, and the camera work, with the circling motif giving the audience a sense of her entrapment within her own life.  The scene will finish as the camera spins round to her in a mental hospital, stopping on her face and zooming out into a long shot where you can see a doctor trying to talk to her, repeating her name.