Ideas for Opening Two Minutes

Two minute opening scene:

·         The older sister is getting ready to go to a party. She is waiting for her friends to come because they are going to go together. She has her phone on her dresser, and she keeps checking it because her friends are late.

·         All of a sudden there is a knock at the door, so she goes down to open it because she thinks it is her friends. However when she opens there door there is no one there. She thinks nothing of it. She then goes back upstairs and carries on doing her make-up.

·         She then hears a knock at the door again. This time she thinks that her friends are going to be there. However they are not, she goes outside and looks up and down her road. There is no sign of anyone being there. So she goes back up stairs and checks her phone. Once again she ignores it thinking that she made it up

·         Another five minutes later she hears the knock, this she shouts down to her sister ‘stop knocking you freak’. Her sister replies ‘I’m not?’ she then says ‘what is that knocking then?’ her sister then says ‘what knocking?’ then the whole house goes silent.

·         She hears the knocking again, she slowly walks down stairs breathing heavily, opens the door and sees black silhouette of a man. She gasps.

·         The younger sister calls out ‘it’s him, isn’t it?’ and the lights go out and a loud scream is let out by the older sister. The scene then ends.

Ideas for Film Outline

Coursework Film Plot

Background information:

·         A girl aged about 18 is getting ready to go to a party. We can tell the relationship between her and her sister is not very strong. They hardly get along this is because the older sister does not like her younger sister. This is not like a normal sister relationship where they do not like each other but they have a passionate hate against each other. Their parents have died in an accident that the younger sister was also in. This is why the older sister hates the younger sister. However she looks after her sister. They never reported their parent’s death so no one is aware that she is caring for her little sister.

·         The way that the little sister is portrayed is as if there is something mentally wrong with her. The story behind her is that she had an accident where her parents died and everyone thought that she recovered 100% from it. It turns out that every week since the accident she has been having an on-going dream, which in actual fact is reality. The on-going dream is her constantly seeing a black silhouette of a man that visits a cold dark room each week and stands in there looks around and shares a deep cold chilling laugh. She tries to tell her sister about it, but as the sister does not like her so takes no notice of it.

Outline of the film:

After the sister gets taken we see the little sister go looking for her. She knows where she is, as in she knows she is in that room that she sees in her dream. During the film we also see the storyline of the older sister. We see her get taken away and locked in the cold dark room; he takes her clothes and gives her a hospital dressing gown to wear and a small blanket. As the film progresses we see the sister putting the pieces together forcing herself to sleep in order to find her sister. Her sister appears in in the dream as she does in her part of the story. Her story is that she becomes so traumatised that she starts to hear the knocking on the door in head every five minutes for the rest of her life. She becomes a psychopath, shouting abusive things at herself, she also forgets why this has happened to her and what life is like outside this room, and she gets totally brain washed of everything. The day that her younger sister reaches the place of where her older sister is, is the day that her older sister gets brutally murdered by the black silhouette. The younger sister finds the entrance to the room as he finishes murdering her, all you then see is her with a torch shining on his face with a disturbing smile on his face. This is the first and last time we see his face.

Idea for Film Outline

My version of our film

·         Main character is getting ready to go out. Friends are supposed to be coming round to her house first

·         Whilst getting ready she hears a knock at the door

·         Opens the door thinking it could be her friends yet there is nobody there to greet

·         Goes back to getting ready to hear another knock at the door

·         Tells her sister to either stop knocking or to open the door, sister says no

·         Main character goes to open the door and somebody is there

·         Younger sister somehow knows who it is by saying “It’s him isn’t it”

·         The unknown character pushes himself through the front door and knocks the main character out.

·         The man then drags the girl to his car which little is revealed about its colour or model (This is all shown from youngest sisters perspective)

·         The kidnapped girl then wakes us to find herself in a back of a van (blacks in and out of consciousness)

·         Another man gets her out of the van and carries her into a cellar like room, he shows a more caring side to the girl.

·         The room is revealed to contain a operating table and a dentist chair that has been modified to strap someone in it.

·         The gentle man sits her in the dentist chair and splashes water on her face to wake her up. He then reveals in a rush why she is there and what will happen to her.

·         The girl is told there is “something wrong” with her yet she never finds out what it really is

·         Twisted scientists start to perform experiments on her and locking her up in a cell when they finish (daily routine)

·         One day something sparks inside of her, stopping any other the treatment to take place.

·         She manages to escape to find herself on a military base

·         Starts to run away, all the officials run out to start shooting her

·         A car rolls up and someone inside shouts “GET IN”

·         The end.

Value of Research So Far

·         From my research into looking at film openings I have learnt that the key to a good film is to have a gripping first 2 minutes. From the films that I have watched, some sort of action took place, revealing intriguing information which does make you want to watch further.

·         Main characters are generally established in the first 2 minutes so for my opening the main character is the main focus

·          I also learnt that key establishing shots helps the viewer to relate to the film itself as when watching films for my research I preferred the films that showed where the film was set as I could relate to the characters situation better

·         Many of the films that I watched also had quite simple openings to them with the basic information on the credits showing the title screens generally in black and white.

·         Also, music over the titles and credits also helps the audience become more comfortable before the film actually starts as it is an instant feel to the films mood which I hope to put into my film as my aim is to shock the audience into thinking it isn’t a thriller.

·         With the main character being introduced at the beginning a few other films had an extra character which also helps to get the story rolling. In my film I’m having a key main character with a possible sibling to help establish the situation better.

·         I’ve also noticed that the more well known producer companies have an iconic logo which is eye catchy. My group and I came up with a deer with antlers as our logo. Many companies have a link to nature in their names so we followed the same path to come up with ours.

Presenting Early Coursework Ideas

Here we are walking through some initial ideas for our film opening. These are rough early ideas, we expect them to change, but we are trying here to see if our first ideas are practical.

Evaluating Practise Film Sequence

Here is our first attempt at filming a 2 minute film sequence. We were given the murder genre as a starting point.

Evaluation of the Murder Scene

Planning and Storyboarding

Our group rushed through the planning stage as we were eager to start filming. The plotline was simple and very vague – there was no dialogue planned and different camera shots and angles were mentioned four times at most. Naturally, it took longer to film as we had to think about how we should film it - what to say, how the characters have to act and what camera angle we should use for a certain scene. An improvement would be to have drawn out shot-by-shot breakdowns i.e., for one shot - it would consist of a rough sketch of the wanted shot; outline details such as what’s going to happen in the shot, camera angles that will be used, dialogues, sound effects, mise-en-scene etc.

Mise-en-scene

1.      Setting/Location – our original plan was to use the backstage in the Hall as our primary location. Upon filming, we encountered an inevitable inconvenience; the Hall was being used for a PE lesson. We opted for the back of the DT workshops instead as it was considered by the group as ‘spooky’. The location didn’t work well because, the scene consists of a Drama student and teacher rehearsing lines and in any situation, those two people have no reason whatsoever to be in a place like that. An improvement would be to use an unused classroom as it would also be a suitable location for a scene like that.

2.      Costume – we didn’t need any drastic costumes. Our uniforms were enough as the student and teacher but we acquired a hooded jumper to conceal the murderer’s identity.

3.      Actors – we only needed 3 actors; the Drama student, the Drama teacher and the murderer.

4.      Lighting – we were filming outdoors and it was sunny. It did not suit the terrifying atmosphere we were trying to create. On the other hand, the bright lighting with the dark atmosphere has created an ironic effect on death because usually, when death occurs outdoors, the skies are grey, the clouds roll in and it starts to rain. An improvement would have been to film indoors; bright artificial lighting gives off a harsher and colder atmosphere in contrast to natural lighting, which gives a warmer feeling.

5.      Props – we were short of props when were filming. The props we had were a piece of paper and a chair. The chair was unnecessary because our location was somewhere devoid of chairs; it seems too random and too convenient for a chair to have appeared out of nowhere – deus ex machina. The most important prop we forgot to consider was the murder weapon – we picked out a large fallen branch from our location as our murder weapon and tried to make it look like it had a sharp edge at the end. A prop that would have been useful was a Drama textbook or a book of a play to make the scene more believable.

Camerawork

While filming, we experimented with what camera shots and angles worked best for a certain scene e.g., the duologue between the student and the teacher started off as a long shot, but was then decided to be a two-shot. Although we used an over the shoulder shot to portray the student looking at the teacher storming off, it wasn’t as effective as we had hoped – an improvement was to have shot the over the shoulder shot closer to the student’s shoulder. Another shot that could be improved is the scene where we see the murderer’s footsteps; instead of filming it from a high angle, it could have been on ground level, to make the footsteps appear bigger and the murderer seem like a powerful giant.

Another improvement was to have an establishing shot. Even though the location wasn’t ideal, it would still be helpful to introduce the audience to the location.

Editing

We had a lot of footage, but ended up using only a 1/3. During editing, we compared two similar footages and chose which one was better for the final cut. We only cut videos and spliced them together; we did not use any special effects or filters at all.

Improvements:

1.      Use special effects such as slowing down when the murderer raises his weapon

2.      Use a cool-coloured (i.e. blue) filter to eliminate some of the natural light to create a creepier atmosphere.

3.      Use transitions such as fade in to start the film and fade to black to end it.

 Sound

My editing partner and I used two pieces of music: one was a poignant piece for the emotional part when the student’s theatrical efforts were rejected and refused by the teacher and another was for when the murderer’s footsteps were followed by the camera – a sinister, drum-beating piece was used.

Improvements:

1.      Use sound effects as well such as the wind, chatter of students in the background, scraping of the weapon etc.

 

2.      Use sound-enhancement – the crunching of the leaves when the murderer walks was perfect but was quieter in the video.

Practise Film Sequence and Evaluation

In order to prepare for our coursework, we filmed sequences that ended in a murder, then looked at different areas where we could improve our work.

Planning and story boarding

My group and I used the story board as a basic guideline to what we were doing on film. We looked at it to plan our basic approach to filming but then abandoned it as what we had planned out would have been too difficult to film. Our film was supposed to end in a fatal fall from Rachel down the stairs, but obviously due to health and safety we couldn’t really fulfil the main aspect of the film, so instead we had to film Rachel stumbling backwards and then a black screen in hope the audience would use their imagination picture Rachel falling down the stairs. This does not mean that our film clip wasn’t effective, just that our basic plot was possibly too complicated to do.

Location

For the video clip I feel that the over location for it was actually quite effective. We chose to use some outdoor stairs for our key action as well as using a walkway between classrooms to stage the chase. The walk way was quite ideal as it was clear and narrow enough to be able to film a intimidating chase. We also managed to use synchronous sound as, as we were filming, there were other pupils in the study rooms allowing us to incorporate natural sound into our film clip which made it more believable as a story line.

Editing Decisions

Overall, I think our group made some very good editing decisions. We decided to split out group in two, splitting the film into the beginning and end. With this, my partner and I worked on the beginning of the story, attempting to use our computer skills to the max. My partner and I did find it hard to cut scenes and add new sections into the video without it looking slightly unprofessional. Yet at one specific part, my partner and I did successfully pull off a clean transition from one cut scene to another, which we both were quite happy with. At one part,  we were not happy with the speed the two actresses were running at so we decided to speed up that section of film, yet the downside to that was it ended up turning the little scream into a comical carton chipmunk sound making our ending less effective.

Use of the Camera/ Tripod

Whilst using the tripod we did find it difficult to adjust the camera to how we wanted it without the tripod being unstable. Due to that, we struggled changing the cameras position smoothly and it resulted in having shaky footage. On the whole though, for our real coursework, I think better practise with the camera is necessary as it was our first time using that equipment.

Use of sound

Our film clip didn’t have any added sounds which I think did work as the film itself was too serious to have music in the background. Even with non-diegetic sound it wouldn’t have flowed with the scenes as there was always dialogue and sometimes hard to hear because of the location we shot it in.

 Overall, I do believe our film clip was a good murder mystery as the audience followed the story watching one of the actresses being chases resulting in her falling down the stairs.  As a group I think we all worked well and voiced our views and opinions which were equally heard and taken onboard. For our coursework, I hope to be able to achieve a more professional finish to the final cut. In doing this, I wish to use more of the sound editing available as this can create a better feel for films and play with the audiences emotions.