My Final Idea

My finalised idea is about a CEO of a company who makes faulty cars. He is aware of the low standard of cars his company produces and he knows the death toll is very high, but he choses to ignore these factors because he earns a lot of money.

The opening title sequence would show the guy's daily routine, i.e. getting ready for work, driving to work and having board meetings. I feel like the man should be roughly in is mid-twenties because he needs to be at an age where he is old enough to run a company, but young enough to be arrogant. I also imagined the man to have medium length, dark hair and keeps himself fit.

I was planning on mainly using short and snappy shots to establish the variety of luxuries he endures and to show the garden outside. My main objective is to make people envy this character and when the sports car gets introduced into the sequence, people hate him more.

Just having a normal opening title sequence wouldn't make the audience dislike the man even though he has nice items, so to guide the audience towards this hatred, I intend for a voice over to go over the top of the footage which would be of the man boasting about his wonderful life and how he doesn't care that people die due to the faulty cars. By giving the man a lack of empathy and making him seem arrogant, the audience will want some justice and will hope that the rest of the film will show the man's business collapsing and probably ending up in jail.

Group Meeting#3

In this lesson we knew that we were down to two ideas; the CEO idea where a fashionable man kills people with his faulty cars to make profit and the idea that a depressed teenager takes Prozac and kills people. There were advantages and disadvantages to filming both ideas and its fairly equal which is why it's hard to choose between them.

The advantages with the CEO idea is that the facilities we would be using to film our sequence would be very interesting and enjoyable and the modern features to the house would make our work look more professional. However the disadvantages would be that we were not given permission to use the house and car and therefore we would find it hard to find a location suitable for the sequence. The office scene would also be hard to film because not many places in Surrey have a New York styled office with a big, long table and leather seats. The difficult scenes could be changed to something more suitable but it would change the story slightly. 

The advantages with the Prozac idea is that the location needed is very accessible and all of the scenes have a realistic chance to be filmed within a day because of its simplicity. The camera work and editing would make the sequence look more interesting rather than the location itself. On the contrary, there are disadvantages such as that the shots involve too many give-aways and ruin the tension. The plan was to show the end at the beginning and make a cyclic story, however the final scene at the end would be ruined because the opening sequence would have ruined the enigma behind the scene. I also feel as if the cyclic structure of a film has been overdone in recent years because directors still feel as if its a fairly new way of storytelling, but what they don't realise is that everyone is trying to "think outside the box" which makes those types of ideas unoriginal.

So that we didn't get caught up on picking one idea, we developed both storyboards and the character/cast lists that went with them and then by the time we attempt to get the green light from Matt, he can hopefully look at both ideas with a clear vision of how they will end up looking and decide for us the best idea.

(Eliminated both bottom storyboards)

Group Meeting#2

Storyboard for Prozac

Storyboards

Group Meeting#1

Today's lesson was our first lesson as a group in which we would discuss our ideas, see which ideas are the best and try and eliminate as many as possible to make our decision easier so that we could start storyboarding.

From when we presented our ideas to the class, we already had a rough idea of what our ideas were, but we wanted to refresh everyones memories so that we can make a rational decision.

After going round through the group, we could clearly see that we had some strong ideas within the group and that it was going to be difficult to decide the best ideas.

Our reasoning behind the eliminations would have to consider the accessibility of props and location, the audiences understanding and whether the title sequence used interesting and unique shots.

We immediately took out my two ideas about the zombie babysitter and the cabin in the woods because they were overdone and would look tacky. We also got rid of the kidnapping idea because I didn't have much of an idea about how I was going to film the sequence, so we were left with the fire idea. 

We then eliminated all of Dasha's ideas except for the one about a man being obsessed with girls that had blonde hair and blue eyes. We felt as if this idea from Dasha was incredibly strong and had great visual effects and so her other ideas would have just been backups.

From Ashen's selection of ideas we kept the idea of a depressed boy on Prozac because although the story wasn't fantastic, the opening sequence seemed very interesting and fun to film. 

Alen's ideas were the hardest to choose from because they were all so good. At first we were stuck on two ideas, poison and security cameras. I was the only member of the group that didn't like the poison idea because it seemed as if it belonged in the middle of the film rather than the opening. This was mainly down to he death and the obviousness of it.

Today was very productive and I'm really excited for the next lesson to see what idea we may choose.

The Group (Adam's Disciples)

                                               WELCOME TO THE LIFE OF ADAM'S DECIPLES!!!

Straight away I knew that we would work really well together. We all had good ideas and we all accepted that our ideas might not be used in the end.

There were a lot of strengths in the group as well for example, Dasha is very good at thinking on the spot so she could adapt her ideas depending on what didn't work. Ashen is very creative and visual and can picture exactly how he wants ideas to look and what the finished product will look like. Alen is again very creative but he can see how ideas will work from different peoples perspectives and sometimes improve other peoples ideas. I on the other hand am very good at bringing an idea together so that it would logically work, but my only issue is that I get quite attached to my own ideas especially if I feel like it would be amazing.                                                                                           Those storyboards that you see are the final ideas that we are left with, my next post will show exactly which ideas are our favourites as there are two clear winners. It will be hard to decide between these two but with our good team spirit and determination will get to a decision and make the best title opening sequence of the century!!!                                      

How we got into groups

In todays lesson, we devised into groups. This was done by random selection and our teacher Adam used an app which chose a name at random from the class. Originally he was thinking of selecting the groups himself because he felt that there were too many strong ideas and if the random selection made a group with the best ideas, more than one good idea would go to waste. In the end he felt that other people didn't have that many bad ideas and so he went for random. If there was a group which was clearly the best group in terms of ideas, he would then fiddle with it, but the app chose good groups where there were at least two really strong ideas.
My group consists of Alen, Ashen, Dasha and obviously myself.

Fourth Idea

For this idea, a woman is walking alone in the woods because she got kidnapped and dumped in the middle of the woods. She finds a Cabin and goes inside for shelter. A man approaches her and offers to look after her as she told him what had just happened to her. She soon realises that he is mentally disturbed because she finds a secret basement which is stored with different pictures of little girls and also some decapitated limbs. She escapes and goes to tell the police. When she goes back to where the cabin was, to show the police, it has disappeared. She is very confused but is happy she escaped and carries on with her life.

A few weeks later, she witnesses a woman being abducted late at night in an alleyway and so she gets in her car and follows the kidnappers. After a few hours of driving, she sees the woman get dumped into the woods but realises that it is the same place as when she was kidnapped. She is intrigued and she follows the women up to the point when she spots the cabin. She tells the woman to not go in the cabin, but the woman doesn't believe her and walks in. She follows the woman into the cabin and hides in the basement.

Later on in the film, we see the woman being tied up in the basement to be chopped up and so the other woman hiding tries to set her free but the man catches her. Just before the man is about to kill her the police arrives shoots him after getting a call from the woman before she went into the cabin.

The title sequence would be of a couple walking through the woods on a date and as they kiss, they here a strange noise which seems to be a nursery rhyme. The man investigates but disappears in the fog. The woman is screaming his name and starts to hear footsteps near her. She stands up against a tree and we see a shadowed figure appear over her shoulder from the other side of the tree.

Third Idea

A husband and wife are struggling to deal with their 10 year old twins because they are mischievous and naughty and both of the parents are usually occupied by their work.
They employ a babysitter to look after the kids. While the babysitter is looking after the kids, we see that she is somewhat disturbed. We come to this assumption because she is talking to herself a lot and the kids notice this behaviour and confronts her about it. She says that she is Schizophrenic and that there is nothing to worry about.

One night she tells the kids that she is going out for a jog, but what they don't realise is that she is the cause of the mysterious, gory deaths in the village and this is caused by an evil devil.
When night falls at precisely 9.32 pm, she takes a weird transformation and a spiritual devil possesses her. She tells the kids to go to bed at 9.00 so that they don't realise who she really is.

One night the children disobey her and they leave their room and while walking downstairs they hear strange scratching noises. They find the babysitter sat in the corner and when they touch her she turns around with blood all over her mouth and tries to attack them. The kids make it back to the room safely and stay there till the morning.

During the rest of the film, the kids find out more weird things that the babysitter does and starts to suspect her for the killings. The parents come home from work after getting a call from the kids and they see the babysitter while transformed.

The good side of the babysitter starts to take back her own body but the devil is too strong and overpowers her. Eventually the babysitter takes control and kills herself because she knows the damage that she has caused and that the devil would have fully taken over if she didn't die.

The opening title sequence would use a drone to follow a couple in the woods. The music becomes unsettling and the woods seems to become darker and more foggy. They come across loads of dead, bloody bodies and they try to run away, but we then see  some sort of deformed creature standing in their way, which then runs quickly towards them. Cut to black out.

I was heavily influenced by "The Evil Dead" because of the special effects and make-up of the zombie-like creatures.

Second Idea

    2.  Husband tried to kill wife because she took custody of children by setting the house on fire, but he got caught up in the flames, she escaped from her room and the house blew up so he was assumed dead. 

     A few years on, she starts having nightmares about the incident and she is having visions of him alive and keeps seeing him with a burnt/scared face. She tries to tell people and the police that he is still alive and is trying to kill her but they think she has gone mental so gets sent to a mental institute. 

     

     When she comes out it seems as if the visions have stopped, but one night she wakes up, goes to the toilet to find that the mirror has red writing “you should never have got the kids” and the children are gone from the house. She contacts police and they investigate and to insure safety they get an officer to stay in the house with her to protect her. The next night the officer hears something and goes looking round the house, the husband kills him and takes uniform. He knocks on wife’s door and asks to come in to see if she is ok and as she doesn’t realise the police officer is dead, she lets him in. While she is in the shower, he comes in and attempts to strangle her and he then slips and whacks his on the toilet seat and dies. The kids are found in a warehouse and all is good again.

Title sequence starts with wife putting babies into the cot in her room and doing motherly stuff that makes us connect to her. Then the front door opens, but we only see black shoes walking in. We have a close up of a cigarette and we then cut to the wife. The wife is upstairs and we see her in bed. The man then pours gasoline on the floor and we have a few faced paced shots cutting between husband and wife. As a slow motion shows him dropping the cigarette, she opens her eyes and we cut back to the slow motion cigarette hitting the floor. Special effects come in which makes us follow the journey of the fire and  the credits role over the top.

The only inspiration I had on this piece was the title sequence from "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo", because I like the special effects of the ink trail and shapes it makes.

First Film/Opening Title Sequence Idea

1. Story of a girl who gets kidnapped from family to get experimented on for cloning because the clones body parts will then be sold to patients who need new limbs or transplants of organs. She is kept for a few months while they try make her clone but she isn't cooperating and so they need to torture her to force her to give up fighting the cloning process.  If her clone was made, she would then be killed afterwards anyway because otherwise if she told people about the cloning process, people will know where the transplants are coming from. 

She gets tortured, but she finally escapes to find that a lot of people she knows are just clones and don't know who she is. As she goes to tell her parents who she is, there is a note on the floor of the front door saying “If you tell them, you all die” and a few clones in disguise look at her and have guns in their pockets so she knows she can never reveal who she is. Based on Madeline McCane and inspired by I, Robot and The Island.

Opening title sequence shows pitch black the whole way through and the audience hears the whole scene. A girl is breathing heavily and seems distressed, then a man walks into a room and we hear sounds of metal scratching on the ground. We hear some dialogue about if the girl would give in or come to an agreement, but she still refuses so she gets hit with the pole and beaten up and as he goes to cut her, we hear a stabbing sound but it’s the man that screams. We hear running and a door slam open, we than pan up into white light to represent that she has escaped.