This document provides details for planning an opening sequence for a psychological horror film. It outlines 10 bullet points describing the key story elements, including a clown standing in the road seen by a child, flashbacks to the clown's childhood of torturing a clown doll, and the clown appearing behind the child. It discusses genre conventions like the twisted mind being the weapon and an ordinary setting. It includes enigma codes to hint at the clown's motives. It proposes shot types and editing techniques. Locations are a house by the road. The target audience is 15 and over, and Hammer Films is given as the production company. A 15 rating is chosen allowing strong violence and language.

1. Synopsis Planning
Gabriella
Nikol
Ewelina

2. Story in 10 bullet points
• Clown is in the middle of the road and the child looking out of the window and she sees the
clown holding a balloon.
• Flashback to when the clown was a young boy. We show him playing/torturing the clown
doll.
• Flash forward to him when he is older to him laying out his makeup one by one.
• Flashback back to his child hood. The clown doll is staring at him.
• Flash forward to him slowly putting the makeup on.
• The child walks down the stairs and out of the door.
• POV when she is looking down at something. She looks up and the clown isn’t there, so she
goes to walk away.
• She turns around and the clown is standing behind her.
• He has the doll from his past in his hands and gives her the doll.
• Then the doll is lying in the bushes.

3. Conventions
Genre conventions that we will include:
Weapons: in psychological horror, the weapons are not actual physical objects but tend to be
more psychological such as the killers twisted mind. In our OTS, our weapon is the killer’s
twisted mind.
Setting: the setting for psychological horror tend to be in a forest, a massive house, a hospital
etc., as this creates realism for the audience and makes them more cautious on day to day
bases. Our location will be filmed on an ordinary road/house/bathroom.
Characters: these usually include disturbed people that are seeking revenge from their past.
Our OTS has the clown who is disturbed.
Sound: The non-diegetic sound tends to be creepy and sometimes not match the action on the
screen, so we could try to use this when the clown appears.
CAM SAMC: We will try to use close ups on facial features such as eyes to show fear.

4. Enigma Codes
Enigma Codes:
• Balloon fly’s away- (why did the balloon fly away
and why did the girl let go of the balloon?)
• Clown- (what does he want from the girl at this
time in the evening?)
• Clown doll – (why does the boy have a clown?)

5. Editing
• Shot-reverse-shot/180◦ rule: we will use this when the clown is
talking to the child.
• Eye-line matching: When the child looks at the clown from across the
road.
• Cross cutting: we could use this when the child is coming down the
stairs and when the clown is putting on his makeup.
• Pace: we could mix slow and normal pace for when he is putting on
the makeup.
• Ellipsis: we are going to use this for when he disappears and then
appears again behind the child as we are not going to show him
walking.
• Transitions: mostly fade to black as it creates more tension.

6. Locations:
For the road scene we are going to us one of our houses to film from outside the
window, on the stairs and outside on the road.
Target audience:
The target audience of our OTS will be 15 and over.
Production Company:
We will use existing British production company, HAMMER, which is known for
producing many horrors, such as famous “Dracula” (1958) and “The woman in
black” (2012)
Characters in our OTS:
• Little boy
• Little girl
• Clown
Other aspects of opening sequence

7. Ratings
We have given our opening sequence a rating of 15.
For a film to be classified as 15, it is allowed to have these
things:
• strong violence
• frequent strong language (e.g. 'f***').
• portrayals of sexual activity
• strong verbal references to sex
• brief scenes of sexual violence or verbal references to
sexual violence
• discriminatory language or behavior
• drug taking