Idea for opening few shots

During our lesson yesterday we had a few ideas on how the opening scene would look, we then came up with one idea that we thought would look really good and effective. This was for the opening few shots to be following the trap back to the tent, slowly, whilst titles came up on the screen. The reason we thought this was good was so that the audience could have some background infomation and maybe a slight clue of what is happening rather than jumping to the shot of him in the tent. Secondly during this opening we could also set the scene with all the boxes, debri and clothes to indicate an apocalyse is going on. To give the opening shots a wierder feel whilst its following the trap, eerie and tense music will be added to give it a more dramatic effect.

Setting

We have come to our final descion on where abouts we are going to shoot our sequence, we have decided to use Ewhurst place which is a boarding house, we decided to use it as it is a fiarly large hallway with a big door, its not too big therefore not too impractical to set up with all the strings. I have previously put some pictures up of the house. We also have started to find and purchase different items and props for our thriller.

Thriller props

For props we need items and other things to make the inside of our setting look like there has been sort of apocalypse these may include:
- Big boxes of simple and cheap food like soup.
-Messy empty boxes.
-Messy toiletries.
-Clothes.
-Debri.

We also need props to develop the character of our character and things he does such as the trap, for this we need:
-Axe.
-White/Blue contact lense.
-Tent.
-Strings.
-Bell.
-Cans.

Trap inspiration

The idea that we wanted give off was that someone had been in the hall for a long time and waiting for something to attack. Something that would do this is a spider, and a spider web is its trap. We wanted the trap to look as if it had taken a long time to make and covers a wide space of the set, using lots of strings with cans on them. We liked the idea of a spider web just more human, so we could use strings instead.

Real life inspiration

On the way back into house a noticed that our hallway could be an effective set for our thriller, its big and wide which could easily fit a tent in and with a little help could be converted into a more creepy looking piece of space. There is also a very old looking door, which looks scary. I don know if we should use it for sure as we have not seen many other examples however i think it could work. 

Further Research

Too look into what we are interested in putting in our opening thriller, we looked at some of the most famous thrillers around. Even though the plot of the narratives were completely different some shots had interested me and i wanted to give off a similar effect with our thriller. For example i liked the idea of the character looking at himself in the mirror in a serious way, for example in the opening of American Physcho (below)

I liked the idea of the character looking and reflecting on himself, however in this sequence the mirror is way too neat and tidy. For our thriller, i think a smash and grubby idea would have a dramatic effect on the audience. I had watched other opening intros and something that also had stood out was the text used for titles and the cast, which could potentially add a big effect. In particular the titles that caught my eye was the ones in "Se7en" the reason for this was because the text was constantly moving in sudden bursts giving it an eerie effect. Also the actually font is very gritty having small but effective effect on the audience:

I think similar use of font and movement of the text would be effective, however in ours i think there should only be 3 or 4 titles rather than many as it may take the attention away from the narrative.

Inspiration

To gain some more inspiration and ideas for certain shots, items and scenarios for our thriller opening, we used the internet as a research point in which we could find new ideas. We started off by typing in words associated with our idea, for example "big scary hall" and "apocalypse" and we were able to find pictures to help us establish what we wanted the hall (setting) to look like:

We liked the idea of the hallway being rundown, messy and not looked after. Therefore giving it the effect that it had possibly not been treated for a long time portraying some sort of apocalypse. We also liked the idea of having a shot looking down the whole hallway (like above), on the other hand we thought it would be more effect if it would be wider in order to fit everything in the shot. 

We then found out some interesting things when we researched apocalypse:

Even though we were not filming anything outside, we found pictures to what we wanted to portray what was outside. For example we wanted to give off the feeling everything was run down e.g.. socialisation, buildings transport etc... To show this inside we could show lack of goods e.g. not shaving, lack of food and lack of hygiene which would connote to the audience the character had not been outside in a while and also he was not able to get hold of certain goods that normally are easy to get hold of.