Official Film Opening Pitch and Narrative

Pitch

Meg and I will be creating a social-realist crime thriller, set in contemporary South East London. Our ideas are based around memory loss and human relationships, creating both enigma and suspense to keep the audience questioning.

To briefly summarise the plot in the opening, we find out through a series of flashbacks that the female protagonist has killed her friend, but can't remember exactly what she's done or why she's done it.

Narrative

The Final Narrative

• The opening shot will be a wide shot of our female protagonist across the road at night. She begins to walk home to her house (unclear whether it is hers or her parents') that is just off the main road.

• Next door to her house is a cafe, and as she looks up at the hanging sign it triggers a flashback to during the day in the golden hour: she's sitting in the cafe with a man, there is no diegetic sound, only the soundtrack. They're laughing together and smiling, it is ambiguous as to whether they are friends or more than that.

• We cross-cut back to the present, we see the protagonist's hands shaking as she puts the keys in the front door. She walks through the hallway to the kitchen, and feels compelled to call someone, so picks up an old 'brick' phone/ flip up.

• As she does this, she looks over to see a set of kitchen knives, and this triggers another flashback, this time seen in red, and we hear shouts and see the knife and potentially catch the face of the man, but its still ambiguous and vague.

• We hear the sound of the cal going through to voicemail, and as we hear a beep we cut to a black screen and the film title appears

How my ideas have changed since working with Meg

Even though we had separate ideas for our film opening pitches, we wanted to collaborate as we had similar ideas, themes and styles that we both wanted to use. We decided to make a social realist thriller because we both really liked how you can relate to and empathise with characters that could be people you may know in real life. We thought it would be best to simplify our original pitches so we have a couple of flashbacks and one plot to follow, not two people in different locations. As we both liked the idea of shooting a scene in the golden hour we decided to keep that as a flashback, and as we also both liked to shoot in a block colour, so we decided to use Meg's idea of red semiotics in a flashback.



How our ideas have changed since audience research

• As very few people liked having a romance within a thriller, so we decided to make it uncertain as to whether she is in a relationship with the man in the flashback or not.
• We thought that if the opening ended with the sounds of the answer machine, it would seem anticlimactic but also suspenseful, something that was highlighted in the survey, making the audience want to keep watching.
• As the people in both the Survey Monkey and the Vox Pops both really liked the social realist genre, so we want really bring this forward with the mise-en-scene.
• In our second flashback, we want to make it very vague and not rely on gore to make it dramatic, and aspect highlighted in our Vox Pops.

Overall we are really pleased with our concept, and are looking forward to developing our ideas more.