AS MEDIA STUDIES: PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER OPENING

Here is our finished product: Our Psychological Thriller Opening.

Edited Script

When filming, we found that we had to change and edit our original script a little, as we were not able to fit it all into two minutes. We had to change some of the voice overs and cut one out, but I believe that it worked better in the end and created more of an enigma for the audience.

Here is our new version of our script:

Shooting Schedule

 We created a shooting schedule, again by using Celtx so that we know step by step what we are doing and when to ensure that we don't fall behind or stray off track of what we are supposed to be doing:

Here we show what days we are going to film on, what scenes we are going to film and what time we will film them.

Here shows a description of what we're going to film in each scene:

Storyboard

We created a storyboard using Celtx to show what we are going to do in each individual scene, step by step, and to also show what camera movements we are going to use in them. We have four different scenes, including the opening credits, consisting of 'The Field Scene', 'The Bedroom Scene' and 'The Street Scene'. Embedded in 'The Street Scene' is also a flashback which is sort of a scene inside a scene.

 

This storyboard is going to be our guideline to what we will film, how we will film it and what shots will be used when filming our opening. We have included a range of shots such as establishing shots eg. the field, and two-shots eg. when Christian is carrying Alice. This will help us to stay on track of what we are doing to produce our film as well as we are able to.

Character Profiles

This is the character profile we completed for Christian Carter.

 

 

 

We also completed profiles for each of our characters featured in our opening (Christian Carter, Alice Nate, Matthew Carter and Anna Mckenley; who plays the therapist). We did this so that the actors and actresses performing in the opening were able to get into the role of the character and portray the exactly how we wanted. 

 

 

Here is our character profile for Matthew Carter.

 

 



This is our character profile for Alice Nate.

 

 

This is our last character profile, and is for Anna Mckenely.

 

 

Script for Opening

We completed our script for our opening to ensure that we could fit everything in the amount of time we had (two minutes) and so we knew exactly what the characters were saying and when they were saying it to make sure that the opening was as smooth as it could be.

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.