Group Meeting One

Group Discussion

Parts we needed to discuss and decide to begin:
Genre or hybrid genres
Plot outline for whole film
Description of the opening sequence- 2minutes
Location
Main characters- protagonist
Situation that has changed
Narrative Enigma

We started by listing a number of genres we would be interested in:
Comedy
Romance
Musical
Horror
Thriller
Sci-fi
Adventure
Action
Western
War
Fantasy
Rom-com

We chose horror as it is a genre in which we all enjoy and would be interested in working on, also the fact we have watch many will help us decided what looks good and what does not work. We went into more detail and decided that is should not contain blood as that would not look realistic and that is not the look we are going for as we want the audience to feel as if it could happen to them. As we believe the more realistic the more believable. Then we started to think of horror films which we thought worked well, and came up with ‘The Strangers’. From this we decided to use the theme of torment and terrorising rather than murders and full on action straight away as this will give a bigger impact over the audience. We thought that strange events occurring would build the scary atmosphere such as mysterious bangs, screams, door bell rings and phone calls. As well as the appearance of villain, especially as this worked very well in the 2008 horror as it made the audience on edge and jumpy. Fade outs and flashbacks would also help tell the story as they could go back in time to show past events plus move location and scenes such as introducing the credits.

We then moved on to decide the basic outline of the plot and came up with:
Three girls moving into a new flat from out of town where many horrific/ strange occurrences have appeared frequently, such as a girl being found dead on a stairwell in an extremely messed up way. They are warned of this but choose to continue, when they find that the past incidents are about to repeat themselves.

We then wrote the plot for our opening sequence in more detail:
Three girls are moving into a new flat, whilst they are walking in with all the boxes, a strange man is watching them- they don’t realise. When they get inside, they celebrate the move and listen to music. (Superimposed image of a man running towards a girl standing at the window) One of the girls walks back down the stairs to collect another box, she sees an old lady and she stops and talks to her about the flat that the girls are moving in to. The lady seems worried and makes a quick exit. The girl is left wondering. (At this point we will see superimposed image of the man standing over a girl at the bottom of the stairs) Back in the flat, the other two girls are still celebrating, one looks outside to see a man looking up at her, she alarms the other girl and they ignore him. The one who was by herself walks back into the flat to find the door left ajar, and the other two girls not there. She starts to worry and rings the two girls to find that they are not answering, it goes to answer machine. She hears the doorbell go and is reluctant to open it. When she does, it is the other two girls at the door then the door closes and the titles come up on a black screen.