Film Pitch and Narrative

Change of ideas after collaboration:

I have changed my ideas for my narrative since collaborating ideas with Frankie - the film is still going to be an urban crime thriller revolving around a murder investigation, but we decided it would be set in the present day as we felt this would be much more appropriate for the social realist aspect. Furthermore, we decided to not show a dead body in the opening and instead only hint at the murder which will leave the audience guessing but will also make film more creepy as less tends to be more. However, Frankie and I both had similar ideas to do with amnesia and memory loss, so the concept of the protagonist not being able to remember how she is involved in the murder is still the central plot line. We also chose to portray the male as a close friend / possible lover as this way the audience are able to form and invest a stronger relationship with him.

However, we both had strong ideas with colour and lighting - we wanted a scene in the golden hour (which we will use in the cafe flashback), and a scene with block colour (deep red will be used as a semiotic of danger and violence in the murder flashback).

Change of ideas after audience research:

1. As very few people liked the idea of having a romance within a thriller we decided to make it uncertain as to whether she is in a relationship with the man in the flashback or not.
2. In the survey, people seemed very interested in suspense, so we decided to end the opening with the sound of an answer machine and a sound bridge as a cliffhanger.
3. In our second flashback we want to make it very ambiguous and not have to rely on gore to make it dramatic, which was an aspect highlighted in our Vox Pops.

Final narrative: 

The opening wide shot will be from the side of a busy road at night - cars and traffic will be driving past, and the protagonist is seen on the other side of the road. The light will come from car head/tail lights, from buildings and lampposts. There will be a sound bridge in our ident into the opening shot of the heightened sound of the cars driving. There will be no non-diegetic sound in order to establish the social-realist genre.

We then follow her down the road to a house (it is unclear whether it is hers or her parents.) Her walking will be filmed from different angles and edited to be fast paced. There will be soundtrack in the scene here.

There is a cafe outside her house which triggers the first flashback of the golden hour with a man (it is ambiguous as to whether he is a close friend or a lover). There will be no diegetic sound here, only soundtrack. 

We are then brought back to the present with the protagonist entering the house - she walks in to the kitchen and brings out her phone to ring the man from the flashback (we will show this by the protagonist looking through her contact names and pausing at the man's). The diegetic sound will be heightened (e.g. keys jangling, the door opening/shutting, footsteps). As she brings out her phone, a new soundtrack begins, bringing an ominous sense of foreboding.

As the phone is ringing, her eyes notice one of the knives glinting on the rack, triggering the second flashback - the red, violent snapshot of potentially a murder but is kept too short and ambiguous to tell for sure.

The scene ends with the phone going to voicemail and a sound bridge of the answer machine beep onto the title frame of our film.