Pitch Padlet

 I was introduced to a website I hadn't used before called Padlet to work on ideas for my film opening project. I am working with a partner for this project, Olivia Henderson, so we used two separate Padlets to develop our ideas and explore our chosen genre of Psychological thrillers and apply what we have learnt to our project.

What was good about Padlet was that we could effectively separate different ideas and topics, such as looking at specific film openings, as shown below, and imagery we could draw ideas from. This really helped us get a clear idea of what we could include in our film and where our inspiration from other work came from.

This is my Padlet I worked on this week and developed my ideas by looking at the opening of famous psychological thrillers. I took inspiration from the dream sequence in the Babadook, a low budget Australian horror film, looking at the shot of a female character slipping out of her dream and into her bed. I was really interested in the idea of dream versus reality and the shot cutting back into the room once she wakes up. I think that using dream sequences or fantasies could be a really unique and interesting way to present my opening.

Another aspect me and Olivia looked at was soundtracks. Although we wouldn't be able to use specific

songs due to copyright restrictions, we liked finding different songs to develop ideas off the lyrics and feeling of the melodies. I looked at a lot of older songs by artists such as Al Bowlly and Tommy Dorsey which were originally written about love but have a slightly sinister sounding melody. The lyrics are about reflection and memories which we could use to develop a story based on these themes. We used these to come up with ideas for our opening's narrative and build up an image of our characters who would appear in it.

This is Olivia's Padlet with her ideas. Unfortunately, she was off school for the first week of the project, therefore communication was difficult between us but we still managed to give our own personal ideas and additions to the project. She has been looking at more openings to psychological thrillers such as 'The Shining' and 'Black Swan' and has developed her own ideas from them as well as interpretations of their techniques with credit structure and camera shots. She has also noted the similarities between them which she will use to develop an idea for our opening with me once she is back in school.

Developing our idea 

We spent the second week working on our idea and decided to go on a different route to our original themes. We created the idea of a montage of somebody making food for a picnic, with a generally calm and normal atmosphere but an underlying sense of the unheimlich, with the food being made to look gruesome and associated with violent actions. We will do this using mise-en-scene and different close ups and camera angles to emphasize the creepiness of the scene, before giving the big reveal that the couple in the opening are murderers, by showing a dead body hidden in their car as they drive off to have their picnic.

We decided on this idea rather than the others as we believed it would be better to imply the creepy themes in the opening rather than to just show them on screen. We thought the food-making montage would be really effective at displaying that slightly unsettling element of the film, which would be better at keeping the audience guessing what will happen before the big reveal.