Our thriller idea summed up

Final Thriller Plot - Outspoken

Thriller opening plot:

The plot for our opening comes under the psychological and crime sub-genre of thrillers. It consists of six actors, four of very little importance as they are just extras in a shot. The main character (and also the hero of the film) is male and the secondary character a woman fitting into the femme fetal category.

The film opens at a close up of a man's hand, holding a piece of paper with an address/name of place hand written across it. his feet defocused but still clear enough to distinguish. The camera then slowly pans up, to what can be seen as an old warehouse, the address/name written on a old rusty sign to confirm the relation between paper and place. Another close up reveals his hand moving towards the door to open it, and as it opens a little. The following scene opens on a wide shot, inside the warehouse, where we see five people sat around an oval table, much like in the above shot from the film Casino directed by Martin Scorsese. The primary change in our shot is that the boss in this scene, will be the secondary main character, a woman. The scene continues as we hear footsteps walk into the warehouse and the shoulders of our hero appear in the bottom left hand corner of the shot. Some dialogue is exchanged between the hero and the woman; shots changing between the mid table shot, and a close up of the woman's face, shadows covering her eyes so we only see her red lips moving and as she takes long drags of her cigarette. A low angle close up then depicts a gun being raised just above the edge of the table and is fired, cutting to the table mid shot again, left not knowing whether he has been shot or not.

There is a fade to black which last approximately three to four seconds, the sound of phone ringing in the background and a caption that reads "eight hours earlier". The scene opens up showing the man from the previous scene in bed asleep, next to an unidentified woman. He abruptly opens his eyes and frantically looks around, making it apparent he doesn't know where he is. The only clues given as to the identity of the woman is her red lips and and ash tray beside her. The man then answers the phone still confused, and he exchanges dialogue with a stranger, telling him to write down a location on a piece of paper. The location written on the piece of paper is the same as the one from the very first shot of the opening. The scene then fades to black, and the title of the film, 'Outspoken' appears.

Plot has been decided!!!!!

During our lesson today, we went over all the possible plot ideas, linking them to locations, actors, props and equipment that would be needed etc. We had three initial ideas, one from each of us. The idea all of us liked the most was my idea (also the very first post on this blog http://studio101hna.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/blog-post.html, but we quickly decided this was not very feasible in terms of location choice and number of actors. Aidan and hazel then came back today with ideas of their own, Aiden’s' including a hostage theme, and Hazels' a drug heist. We all agreed both ideas would be perfectly do-able but we wanted something a little more original and slightly more complicated, within reason.

After looking around school for locations, and at the auditorium for lighting and possible use of the green screen, we were still hanging on something better. Taken from doing a lot of research on Martin Scorsese, I wanted the use of light to be highly significant in our opening. Looking at the auditorium, we went through the possibilities with the lights in there but soon decided, the stage would make the whole production look highly unprofessional. With about half the lesson already gone, a decision needed to be made fast as we could see we were starting to fall of schedule. I quickly looked at a few more thriller sequences on www.artofthetitle.com trying hard to come up with another idea. Then, thinking of both hazel and Aidan's ideas and with inspiration from Sin City and Momento I came up with a plot which we all agreed on and quickly became excited about. We showed the idea to Miss Hill, who gave us some extra pointers on how to shoot it (possibly a film noir twist). The full plot will be coming soon in another post from me!! SO EXCITED NOW.

Film Journal

When researching directors and thriller films today, I came across this film journal called 'Senses of Cinema'. It has articles on the most highly regarded directors and films, which changes monthly with new articles both factual and critical.     http://sensesofcinema.com

Initial Plot Thoughts

During the very first lesson of brainstorming and ideas, we ran through many plot possibilities. This image shows one of our plot ideas, in brief, for a thriller opening.