PITCH FOR OPENING THRILLER SEQUENCE

By Ashwin, Omar, Raju, Rob

Genre Our chosen genre focuses on the crime

thriller genre which would fit in well as some aspects of our ideas come from the opening sequence of ‘Seven’ and how the killer is always thinking of ways to murder his victims.

Main idea Our main idea is of a mysterious person who

has killed an innocent victim and is planning to kill another. As he is planning the murder there is a continuous cross cut between the planning of the next murder and the body is he hiding of the person he had killed.

Omar will explain in further detail....

Related Movies and Openings We got an idea of the type of shots we want to use

from watching the opening sequence of ‘Se7en’. But we also watched openings from other movies such as ‘The Number 23’ and ‘The Butterfly Effect’ to give us a wider range of ideas and real-life examples to work with. Television show openings such as ‘Dexter’ (not Dexter’s Lab) and ‘Six Feet Under’ also helped give us a different sense of openings and the type of story we wanted our opening sequence to tell as well as the type of shots we wanted to use to portray that story.

How Real-Life Examples Were Used

Our first priority was to see what type of text was good for a thriller film in which we used the film ‘Se7en’ as an example. But we wanted some originality and not simply do something similar to ‘Se7en’. We then looked at other movie openings such as ‘The Number 23’ which was a ‘text-based’ opening to see what type of text the film used and how they used it to fit the thriller genre.

The next problem we faced was to see how to integrate/sync our text with the type of shots and scene we wanted to do. Once again ‘Se7en’ was used as an example to analyse how they used their text/titles with the scenes they shot. We also looked at other type of film openings such as those from ‘Usual Suspects’ and ‘The Butterfly Effect’ to decide what type of shots and scene we wanted to shoot. We then decided on something similar to opening sequences such as ‘Dexter’ and ‘Six Feet Under’ where each shot is short and shows a different action. We then used these two opening sequences to decide how we would shoot our own sequence, make it tell the story we want it to tell as well as how to integrate our titles with the scene and shot types.

Location

The locations for which we have discussed was the cemetery in Cannons Park, these pictures are the from the Cannons Church and Cemetery.

We have already got permission to film on their grounds.

The gloomy, eerie surrounding of the graveyard gives the sense of a mystifying atmosphere. As this builds on the exhilaration and trepidation of the climax, this resolves into keeping the audiences attention. The location and characters presence entices the audience as the killer seems to be revealed.

A graveyard for a horror/thriller movie can be seen as a cliché which is why we wanted to use more than just a graveyard. We wanted to mix up locations by adding a normal apartment or room. Depending on the shot we have different objects which will take up that specific shot. One shot would consist of a close-up of gloves being put on with a black background whilst another would show a sink filled with red liquid. We wouldn’t want to use bright lights for the scene but we also don’t want to show the scene in total darkness, our aim is to create some sense of normality at the beginning of the scene and then take that all away in a quick motion.

Shots + Shot types We were planning to make most of our shots close-ups and

extreme close-ups with a couple of mid-close ups. For our first couple of shots we were planning on using a close-up

to show someone putting on latex gloves. It then goes onto another scene with a close-up of a beaker with

our character putting in something which turns the clear liquid in the beaker red.

Our next shot would be an extreme close-up of a sink filled with a red liquid being drained with a title swirling with it.

There would be some mid-shots of our character dragging a heavy duty garbage bag with something heavy in it, which continuous with him dragging it past a tombstone and him then driving a spade through the dirt (like when digging).

Some screenshots from opening sequences with the type of camera shots our group is planning to use.