Changes to our Thriller Idea

We have had a change of ideas, but not a complete change just tweaking our initial idea to make it work much easier and to make the narrative be able to continue into a whole film rather than our old idea would have cut at 2 minutes and looked like a the whole film and then would've had nowhere to go onto the rest of the film. However, our new idea flows much easier into a whole film idea.

Our initial idea was to:

• Have a girl working in a café
• Soft music playing
• Shot of her initially so the audience can associate with the girl
• Shot of a name tag to show her name is 'Summer'
• Over the shoulder shot of a man watching her
• Flash of a shot of a wall covered in photos of the girl
• The man then follows the girl
• He follows her into her house*
• Shot of padlock on a gate unlocked
• Shot of man walking into gate
• Black screen showing title
• Girl scream on title screen
• Shot of man driving
• Shot of girl in back of truck in bin bag
• Close up of girl’s bare foot, twitching

*Changes to our idea (blue):

·  He stops and watches her walk into her house

• He then gets back into his car and drives home
• He gets home
• Hears a noise upstairs
• Music changes to more dramatic to add tension
• Girl in found dead on the floor in front of the wall of photos
• Flash of title 'Summer's End'
• Panning shot of man's face

            We wanted to do this because we thought that our first idea was not sufficient in that it had nowhere to go from the girl being abducted as the only two characters would have been used and there would be no mystery. However, if the girl dies it leaves the audience wondering why she was killed and by who.  Also it leaves the audience to figure out who the man was and why he was ‘stalking’ the girl.

            We have already thought about music and that we wouldn’t use any diegetic sound in the first scene apart from maybe a scream when the girl dies, but it would add to the tension if no diegetic sound was used for this part and only non-diegetic sound was used in the way of music to compliment or contrast the mood of the film. We thought of using calm, but quite eerie music to begin with – we thought maybe using something to do church bells. Then as the man walks up to the dead girl the music would turn a lot more dramatic to compliment the scene and also foreshadow the death. After the title shot is flashed up on the screen the music would turn back to calm to directly contrast the horrible mood.

            The use of the girl being called ‘Summer’ is because then we can make it relate to the title. If the title is ‘Summer’s End’ it shows a direct association between her and the film, meaning she is the main character. The word ‘End’ is used to show the final moment of something, in this case it’d be her life that would be ending.