Expanding Our Ideas

When discussing our project in lesson we came up with what we think is a really good idea for the opening sequence. We thought of having a continuous scene throughout of someone getting ready like a normal person, we'd only have close ups of each action that is performed as we don't want to show his face during it. Some of these images could be buttoning up a shirt, tying up laces, putting on a suit jacket etc. So if he was tightening up his tie we would have a shot of his shoulders down to the middle of his torso so that the audience is focused on the individual actions. However, after a couple of day to day actions have been done we want to quickly cut in some split second images of weird quite disturbing things like a hand covered in blood sliding down a wall, a distorted image of someone being injected with something and other creepy images which will take the viewer by surprise. We thought this was a good idea because it indicates and gives clues as to what will happen in the film, for example he has just come out of a mental hospital all recovered and is getting on with life normally, which is where the normal day to day getting ready clips come in. It then goes on to the disturbing images which flash up really quickly which can indicate that something horrific is breaking through his memory and that he is in fact not a normal man getting ready for work.

From this idea we decided to think about what sort of costumes we would need, we researched the things that people in mental hospitals usually wear and also the stereotypical interpretation of what mental people wear. We found that they are nearly always very plain and pure clothes and the obvious straight jacket is used when patients need to be restricted, so we decided to go with this and have a plain white straight jacket for our main actor to wear. While sorting this out we also agreed that we would use Fred in out group as the actor because we preferably wanted a man to be the main character and he's quite tall, and its easier to use someone in our group than only being able to do filming outside of lesson if our actor was in a lesson at the time. We knew we wouldn't need anymore actors than that and we were also aware of the fact that we shouldn't show the face of the main character during our opening titles because it keeps up the tension of not knowing who the person is yet and adding mystery.

As a group we thought about what sort of music we would have playing in the background as well and came to the decision that a classical sounding piece of music would work well as it can reflect the main characters mind. The classical calm music playing whilst horrible images flash up on screen creates a strange sense of not belonging and hints that this character isn't all right in the head.

For the actual credits we thought of having some appear during the normal getting ready scenes but then also having some appear in the space of a few shots that have a pure white background with something in the corner thats in clear focus, and the names of actors and editors etc. will be quite jolty and distorted much like the opening credits to 'se7en'. We thought that this would put across the genre of the film a bit more and make it look quite good and creepy. For the ending we have decided to have a shot of the back of the man opening his front door, but instead of seeing the normal outdoor life of streets and roads etc. a big white light will fill the screen and the title of our film will appear then. We quite like this idea because it's like him opening the door to his mind because he's trying to get on with his life but the pure white light indicates that memories from the mental hospital will come back. It can also suggest him starting a clean slate because the colour white is associated to be quite pure and new.