Opening sequence and title, ideas and getting into groups.

My sequence ideas

I tried to come up with something that hasn't been approached much before, I think that's everybody's goal in this project, but here are my 3 initial ideas.

I was thinking a lot of cliche things that have been made into movies before, and one of them is betrayal, I picked that and developed an idea. Two young adults, a female and male, are locked up in a what it look like, basement, the sequence starts with a lightbulb swinging above them. The whole sequence is filmed hand held which gives the situation a feeling of rush. We see a turned off bomb and a woman who rushes the guy to “fix” it, he thinks the bomb is on and under pressure tries to dissolve it. As the woman keeps pushing him, the camera stops shaking on a close up of her face as she says: “I'm sorry” and runs away. We see a shot of the bomb counting down 5 seconds, we see the man's eyes as the shit switches between his eyes and the bomb. Screen goes black, we hear 3 final bomb beeps and the title rolls.

Second idea was inspired by a poem called “OCD” by Neil Hilborn. It's a sweet poem which takes a sad turn, but I decided to give it a creepy turn. Everything that happens in this opening title sequence is being narrated with that poem, so everything that's being described in the poem is shown on the screen with a lot of panoramic shot and close ups. He falls in love with a girl who end up leaving him for another guy which doesn't have a good impact on him at all. The guy has OCD so he has to check if the door is locked multiple times, wash his hand, turn the light off etc multiple times, and it's impossible for him not to do those things, therefore in the end there are two lines from the poem which go like this: “I sleep with the door unlocked, I leave the lights on”, and when he says that he loads a gun, the screen goes black and we see the title. So we are not sure if he's a psycho that's maybe going to kill his ex or her new boyfriend or if he's going to kill himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnKZ4pdSU-s

My third idea was inspired by a short film called “lights out” filmed it 2013, which captures a woman that is getting ready to go to bed, so she goes to her bedroom and sees a creepy girl standing in a hallway every time the lights are out, in the end we see the girls scary face, but my idea was instead of revealing the face, we just hear a clap next to the woman face and the screen goes black. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNbJE0y29_c

Pitching the idea

When I presented my idea, I got pretty positive feedback, the only thing is that I needed to add more details and maybe develop it more once i’m in group.

Getting into groups.

At the start my group was: August, Catherine and me which worked well, we brainstormed different ideas, wrote down bullet points and tried to combine all of our ideas to make it all work. We decided to take a sci fi turn on my “bomb” idea and make it more visual and psycho like. We still weren’t a 100% happy about the idea. Unfortunately Catherine had to leave our group since she felt like dropping the subject would benefit her. I personally didn’t have a problem with her dropping out, I wanted her to be happy with her subjects but it definitely did confuse me and August at the beginning, since we worked really well together. After being a bit upset about losing out team mate, we got back on track and came up with our final idea that we are going to use for our opening title sequence.

Discussing our ideas.

So the final and complete idea is a thriller/ horror. It captures 2 main characters: a creepy guy and a quiet girl. The setting is: an old big house, we are planning on using Beatrice Webb house since it has the perfect kind of old style rooms. The sequence opens to a big round Christmas table, with a bunch of decorations and Christmas food. We see a pan shot of two mans backs and a girl right between them, the main guy who is sitting in the middle of the table prepares everything for the dinner, so he talk to the people at the table saying:”shall we listen to some music?”, gets up and puts a Christmas song on an old radio, we see the girl following him with her eyes, she is not super pleased about the situation. The man keeps trying to cheer everyone up and starts asking people questions but doesn’t get the answers. He then gets up again and puts a Christmas hat on everyone, after doing that he sits back down, we see the back of his head, he raises his glass and says “merry Christmas”. The camera zooms out and we see that everybody besides the girl and the creepy man are dead, and they are just tied up to the chairs, their plates are empty. Runs the title.