The document describes the process a group took to develop the opening of their thriller film project. They wanted to subvert expectations of typical thriller settings by using a pub, meant to seem warm and welcoming, and contrasting it with the cold, clinical kitchen. They aimed to reflect this warmth/cold contrast through the characters of the friendly victim and cold, clinical murderer. Flashbacks were included to establish their friendship but also throw its authenticity into question after the crime. An element of the supernatural was incorporated to leave questions unanswered and keep the audience engaged. A storyboard was created to plan scenes, music, and shots to guide the filming of the opening.

1. How we got to the final product

2. When our group thought about thrillers and the ones we had seen in the past,
we concluded that many of them occur in places people usually consider as
‘safe’. In Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, a hotel is a typically comforting place, designed to
look like a ‘home away from home’. Political thrillers are typically set in ‘The
White House’, a building symbolising safety and leadership.
Our group decided we wanted the setting to vary, we wanted the appearance of
a warm, welcoming pub – with a cold, eerie clinical kitchen. Emma worked in
the pub, and the school kitchen classrooms provided the “too clean”
atmosphere we wanted. We wanted the normality and quaintness of the pub to
be put under question, as a pub is typically a friendly place – and most thrillers
are set in seemingly normal places.

3. Our group wanted that warm/cold contrast to be reflected in our two characters. We
wanted the ‘murderer’ to be the cold, clinical character, and the ‘victim’ to be shown
as a friendly one, feeding into the warmth that the setting portrays.
We did this by showing that Alex (our murderer) was unemotional about cleaning up
the scene where she has just killed her friend, Me (funny that, I’m the one that has to
die). We included flashbacks of their friendship, showing them walking and laughing,
sitting down and laughing, taking photos of themselves (ugh, teenagers) and
genuinely looking as though they were best friends and totally hadn’t just met each
other 5 minutes ago when Alex got roped in. However, the crime that Alex has just
obviously committed throws the authenticity of her friendship with the victim into
some question.
We wanted the audience to question Alex’s motives, question her friendship with my
character and perhaps even question the supposed friendliness of my character. We
didn’t want to answer any questions in our opening of course, otherwise the audience
would be disinterested in the rest of the film (and if we gave it away, what could we
possibly do with the remaining 90 minutes?). We incorporated a possible
supernatural element with the shot of the graffiti on the wall - Did Alex write that?
Who is ‘they’? Did they make Alex commit the crime? Will we find out who ‘they’ are?

4. The beginnings of our first idea are written to the side,
we looked at the different thrillers we could get
inspiration from – “Sev7n” and “Inglorious Basterds”
films which have memorable opening credits. We
specifically liked Tarantino’s opening, with contrapuntal
music used to play with the audience’s expectations of a
thriller.
We also looked at the events after the famous shower
scene in “Psycho” – at how Norman Bates was so used
to cleaning up a gruesome murder like that, without a
shred of emotion or any noticeable mental
repercussions (aside from his mother taking residence
inside his head, but those are just minor details). This is
how we decided that we wanted a cold character, who
the audience could decide “She’s done this before” or
“She really hated the victim”, the audience could take it
from both approaches, or choose one. Either way, the
character is represented in a way that is typical to the
“villains” in thrillers.
We also used this opportunity to plan out some scenes,
the props and the camera angles, to really get a feel for
the opening we were going to make.

5. After deciding that this is a direction we’d like to take
with our thriller, we then drew up a storyboard, which
we used as a guide when making our thriller.
It details what music we’d like – “creepy music in-
between these shots” and then “happy music” (our
small homage to Tarantino). We decided what sounds
should be diegetic and which ones should be non
diegetic – so whilst editing we had a clear set of
instructions to go by.
We also played around with the order of scenes, taking
them out of logical, chronological order and placing
them in a different order – cutting across tense scenes,
coming before the crime, coming after the crime (after
this, we decided to cut the actual act completely, we
wanted to leave some ambiguity of how the victim died
– playing into the vagueness of what type of thriller this
actually is)