Final Idea

To come up with an overall idea for our psychological thriller, we put our two individual ideas together to compare them and work out which aspects we liked best about each others. We then came up with the basis of our final idea:

We then came up with the details of our opening, which were again based on both of our separate ideas. We have the protagonist (Christian Carter) beginning the opening by killing his girlfriend (Alice Nate).
The first things we see and hear is a black screen and then Alice's scream followed by two gun shots. We are then shown Christina carrying Alice through a deserted field who we can clearly see has been killed.
Christian then jolts awake in his bed with a voice over explaining that he experiences the same nightmare every night, but that that the incident actually happened. We are then introduced to a photo of him and Alice smiling together, except Alice's eyes have now been crossed out.
We decided to do this as we wanted to create a sort of enigma to why Christian has killed Alice, and to make our audience wan to find out his reasons for this. The photo will then dissolve into a missing poster of Alice, showing that she has not been found, and people are unsure of whether she is actually dead or not.
Christian appears walking down the street, and another voice over is used to introduce a flashback to when he was younger and found his brother on the floor, dead. He will then state that this event caused him to have to see a therapist.
When he arrives at the therapists office, she opens the door to greet him and Alice steps out, but only Christian notices her, connoting that she is a ghost or some sort of figment of his distorted mind. This is the end of the opening.

 

When looking at Todorov's Narrative Structure Theory, we found that our opening idea does not in fact follow the 'rules' of a film, as we do not start nor end with an equilibrium, meaning that we consequently have nothing to disrupt the start or restore at the end. However, I believe that this works well for our specific genre as Psychological Thrillers are supposed to be out of the ordinary and follow their own set of rules which are separate to other genres.  

We also completed a codes and conventions table which allowed us to figure out how we were going to create enigma, how we were going to set up the plot, how we were going to introduce the characters and what the pace and rhythm and the mood and tone were going to be like, and whether or not they would work well together to attract our audience.