Initial and Final Ideas

Initial and final ideas for our opening sequence


The groups initial ideas was to have a girl commit suicide by hanging herself and leaving a jewelry box that was the sole clue to her death. This would have followed the conventions of a thriller by setting the time of the main characters’ death at night. We would have used quiet and eerie music to start with and then fast, suspended music leading to her death. After a discussion we decided not to go along with this idea as we couldn’t create a sense of realism because it was difficult to make the character seem that she hanged herself. Which then meant that we weren’t able to create enough enigma as the audience would know immediately that she hanged herself making the storyline very limited because there would be no questions raised to make the audience watch.

Our second idea was a flash-back scene witnessing a woman, the main female character, and her boyfriend having an intense argument and then jumping to the present to show her lying dead on her bed, with an investigator attempting to solve the crime. This was loosely based on the TV drama CSI, which we thought would work very well because CSI is interesting and we thought that’s how our one end up being. It would have followed the conventions of a thriller as it had an investigator aiming to solve the crime and a mysterious person who killed the main character. However, this was again very limited in creating mystery as we had to show multiple actors interacting with the main female character in heated situations such as an argument, which could possibly be connected to her death. Consequently, in our minds we thought this would be too long for an opening sequence and would become too complicated, which would result in the sequence being unclear and confusing.

Overall, our final idea was a psycho killer who follows a girl by taking pictures and subsequently kills her. The opening sequence begins with the main victim (Salmaa) walking alone down a dark alleyway, with the only source of ambient light by the lamps. Salmaa would then turn around and notice the stalker following and reacts by running away. This results in Salmaa tripping and screaming, with a flash of a camera going off indicating that the psycho stalker has got her and take a picture of her to add to his collection. The stalker capturing and killing his victim is cemented, when a fade in shows him dragging her body down the same alleyway in a bin liner. We then see the psycho in a different setting which is in the dark room. We see him placing his processed photos of his current and previous victims on the wall. This exhibits that he has committed this crime many times before and now has set his sights on a new victim (Sarah). A fade out introduces Sarah reading a story in the newspaper- the audience are informed of what the story is by a radio news report. We then show a point of view shot, which suggests it is the psycho as he is hiding behind the bushes, stalking Sarah’s every move. It ends with Sarah walking away, which raises questions to the audience such as what will happen to her? Was it the stalker behind the bushes? This then led us to think of a title for the film and we thought of ‘click’. This was because it sums up the film but doesn’t give anything away and click is open to interpretation. It perhaps also makes the audience think of what ‘click’ has to do with a thriller, which creates a sense of anticipation because the audience want to find out how it links with the film and the purpose of the title. This follows the conventions of a thriller as we have set the opening sequence at night which is a vulnerable period; the music we used was slow, eerie music to build anticipation. Furthermore, the dark room was lit in a red color and the opening credits, to create a sinister mood and the connotations of red are death, passion and violence which are all conventions of a thriller. Our film research helped us with our final idea because it showed us how we had to employ different camera angles and shots to create a certain mood or hierarchy of a character. It also taught us that music is important to evoke different feelings from your target audience. The audience research helped us with our final idea as the majority of people we asked liked thrillers to be set at night and that they preferred slow, eerie and ghostly music to create suspense and mood in the opening sequence. Moreover, our opening sequence began as narrative based because the audience research we carried out revealed that most people favored narrative led opening sequence as it doesn’t give too much away in the beginning which lets the storyline develop.