Ideas for opening sequence

In our group we made up and discussed possible ideas that we could use as our opening thriller sequence, once we’d made detailed notes on each idea we then chose which idea we would develop and use as our opening thriller sequence. Examples of ideas we come up with are:


First Idea
We wanted the narrative to be set in a deserted place late at night. The narrative starts with our female protagonist who is running in the middle of the road during night time, we see that there is another protagonist who is fallowing this character but the protagonist’s face is not shown to keep the audience in suspense, later there’s a male dead body. We then end it showing the female protagonist’s bag.


Our group discussed doing this idea because it is an original plot, positive thing of us doing this idea would be that there aren’t a lot of props needed and it is pretty low production. A problem we may encounter if we did this though is that we’d have to find a place that’s extremely deserted so therefore just decided to use a park as a deserted place.


Our target audience would be people aged 16 and upwards as they would be the main people most likely to watch our thriller as they would find it most interesting. Our target audience would like this thriller as it is jumpy and would have unexpected twists if we were to film the whole thriller.

Second idea
The narrative of our second narrative is set in a school/house. The opening sequence starts with a news reporter opening with the news of a group of teenagers who are suddenly dying due to a phone call. The footage starts with a point of view shot of the school/house and a close up on a girls face then suddenly her phone rings but she misses the call and listens to her voice-mail, this is where the twist is, the voice-mail is herself, she is listening to herself dying, she then starts to panic, later we see her running and at this point to audience does not know whether someone is actually following her or what, shaky camera work is used to create tension. We discussed this idea as a possibility for a thriller opening because we thought that it would be popular with our target audience.

Films such as ‘One Missed Call’ and ‘Paranormal Activity’ helped influence our idea and these films have been hugely popular with the audience we are trying to target.


We plan on using the camera in different angles to create suspense and tension. We’ll also focus on the silence at the end of the sequence when the antagonist has killed one of the protagonists. If we were to use this idea as our thriller opening we’d have to either film in college or someone’s house.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1F7hJNsi5M

Final idea
The narrative of our third narrative is about a girl who is being watched why someone but the audience has no idea who, we came up with the idea whether there a strange character wearing black is in a dark room looking at pictures or two certain girls, one of the girls face has been crossed out, and the other there’s writing in near her picture saying next, we see that there is a lot of pictures of this particular girl. Later we see the girl walking about and it appears as if she is being followed. Since this is on opening thriller, we cannot tell the whole story to the audience as we want to keep them in suspense and wondering who this strange character wearing black is and what his plan is with these girls and why?.
We would have to find a location for this, for example find a dark room where we have pictures of the girls all over the black wall.


We also plan on using the camera in different angles to create suspense and tension. Using shaky camera work. We’ll also focus on the silence at the end of the sequence. We discussed this idea as a possibility for a thriller opening because we thought that it would be popular with our target audience as it is a thriller and aimed at 16-25year olds.