BlogPost#7: Initial ideas of film opening
- Iris Li
- Dec 30, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 20, 2023
1. Brief summary of the idea
1st edition (plan A):
In the beginning, we decided to have a story about a party between two girls and one boy as our plan A.
It starts with a couple fighting upstairs, and then the boyfriend comes downstairs and makes a strong drink. The girl’s best friend didn’t find her at the party, so she went upstairs and found her, but she found nothing. After a few minutes, the girl comes stumbling down the stairs, bloody and stabbed. All the people in that party were shocked and had evil intentions. The thing everyone including her best friend doesn’t know is, her boyfriend isn’t what they know. He is abusive, psychopathic, and cruel. Their relationship is full of darkness. Every boy in their school called her a tart because she was charming and popular, but they couldn’t date her. When those who in that party knew she was dead, everyone didn’t appear to be sad, more like none of their business, talking about: "She deserves that/ who knows she has done what…" Her best friend looks not sad and is shocked by the girl’s death.
We named Plan A as '#88', since this title is simple and implies the location of the story (house number).
Plan B:
If we are unable to hold a party, here is our backup plan:
We will mainly focus on the two side personalities of Christopher: Abusive and psychopathic with Lily but treats his girlfriend nicely when they face others. Their relationship was not as healthy and sweet as others thought.
When only he and Lily, he always gaslights Lily, saying: "I criticize you for your good./I’m sorry, really care too much about you to do this./ Why you be so wrong, I love you so much… No one will love you except me, I met lots of beautiful girls, but I only chose you." When they fight, Christopher even chokes her, yelling at her. Lily keeps saying sorry and preying. When they spend time together with others, Christopher will take out his other personality: thoughtfulness, and gentleness… e.g., taking her bag, helping her grab the chairs, hugging her when she feels cold…
Ends up with the girl using the fragment of mirror suicide. Connect with the beginning, the girl is dead, holding the fragment of the mirror in the bathroom.
(We abandoned this plan, and instead made a more complex story as Plan C.)
Plan C:
Unfortunately, because we were unable to gather that many people to film the party scene and we did not find a suitable male character, so we shifted to focus on Lily and her death, from a female detective’s perspective, to find out how Lily is dead and why.
Lily is a person who does not have a good relationship with her friend and has always been bullied in school, her boyfriend also does not treat her well.
The female detective is a powerful, determined person who cares about this case because she thinks the girl is vulnerable and is the only one who truly cares about Lily.
However Lily is not completely innocent, her inner side personality is evil and conflicted.
We gave this story name called :'Lost', which refers different meanings and audiences could find out those from the rest of the film.
2. how does your film opening link back to research
Character:
Plan A:
Lily is a female fatal in the film which is typical in film noir, and all other characters are responsible for her death. The character Karen has completely different characteristics to Lily, which become binary opposite to Lily.
Narrative structure:
We will not follow Todorov's idea of equilibrium, disequilibrium, and New Equilibrium.
We will instead start on disequilibrium and this will be maintained throughout the 2 minutes of the movie opening.
Our characters will not be defined specifically as good or bad, the hero or the villain because they all have something to hide and have bad intentions.
So it will be harder to identify characters with fixed archetypes that Propp mentions.
Setting:
My film research genre is related to thriller and film neo-noir, so the mise-en-scene would be designed inspired by those genres, the lighting we used would be as bald as possible such as bright red and blue. The props we used also linked to the noir genre, clue board, and photos of the dead person.
Application of theory:
Theories that could be applied in my film opening could be Semiotic by Barthes, including the symbolic codes, semantic codes, and enigma codes.
Symbolic codes:
The pictures of the female detective holding,
The butterfly necklace,
The mandala tattoo,
The red tone lighting,
Lily's white dress.
Semantic codes:
The butterfly necklace,
The mandala tattoo.
Enigma codes:
Lily's death, including the location and the reason,
The butterfly necklace,
The mandala tattoo,
The cigarette beside Lily.
Lévi-strauss’s Structuralism- the binary opposition and Representation by Stuart Hall, which helps to construct characters.
The binary opposition within Lily: she wears a white dress which implies she is an innocent person but the tattoo and the alcohol may also bring opposite impact to the audience.
Moreover, Genre theory is also included indeed. Our film opening is inspired by noir and thriller films and it's a hybridity of these genres. We have repeatedly used thrilling background music to create an eerie and unease feeling, also the mise-en-scene we designed for the detective scene was mimicking the neo-noir style film.
Most importantly, two feminist theory, Gender as a performance by Judith Bartlett and Feminist theory by van Zoonen is applied and is the essence of the film opening. As we challenged the conventional noir film by using two females to be the main characters and the gender of the detective is female.
Narratology by Todorov is applied to help build up the tension of the story.
3. What films have inspired me
Last night in Soho(2021)- lighting
Se7en (1995)- set
Gone girl(2014)- character design
Look away(2018)- camera movement
Babylon(2022)- camera movement, editing, sound
The silence of the lamb(1991)- character design
Black Swan (2010)- character design, camera movement, editing
Brick(2005)- camera movement
Enter the void(2009)-lighting
Euphoria(season 1-3)- mise-én-scene, camera movements
4. Who’s your target audience
Our target audience is those under 18 (BBFC-18) since we have a dead body scene that is not suitable for children.
The target audience includes both gender and all ethnicity.
Psychographic audience: Aspires, orientated to image and appearance, persona and fashion, younger audiences.
Socio-economic: Category-E (students), our film opening could be counted as a hybridity of high school drama and thriller, so the story will mainly focus on high school life. Audiences, according to David Gauntlet, are adapting and assimilating ideas about themselves through the various representations that the media presents, so audiences will engage more with the characters that are similar to them. Audiences will understand our representation and common tropes easily.
5. Detailed brainstorm
6. Mood board. Character/ setting/ other
7. Feedback and the Pitch!
The feedback we got from our teacher and classmates is we need to make sure the story could fit into a two minutes film opening, and it needs to be an opening, not a full story. Second is the casting, because we decided to have a party scene, it’s hard to gather many people at the same time. Our teacher also suggested some films that we could research: Cruel Intention and Spring to mind. Moreover, we also need to consider how we could present the character Christopher as an abusive person through clear scenes and patterns of behaviors- how has he done that?
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