In this rationale, we will lay out the plans for the thriller opening we have been tasked to create. We have chosen the psychological thriller genre with elements of crime as the basis for our opening as we are both fans of the subgenre and our audience research shows it to be the most popular among our target demographic. We are hoping to fulfil the pre-production needs in order to create a successful opening with adequate planning and preparation. Additionally, we are excited to use this task as an opportunity to explore creative methodology in both production and narrative delivery. 

 

The audience research we carried out shows that our target audience consists of 17-18 year old males who have a preference for psychological thrillers. This means that we are able to incorporate elements and themes that are more suitable for a mature audience or at least utilise contemporary issues that this audience may face as a starting point for our themes. Our film will have themes of Isolation, Technology and transhumanism as we believe these are interesting paradigms of modern day life that our audience will relate to.

 

Our opening will host 2-3 characters and will majorly focus on one of them. This character, Dan “Small Policeman” (working title), will be tormented and psychologically dissected throughout the film starting with his death at the film’s beginning. The film opens by drawing out of a computer in a cold, empty room. A light turns on and Dan enters through the right before sitting down at his computer. From the monitor emerges Devlin, a computer man, who proceeds to shoot at Dan. The Camera draws out of the room leaving behind a corpse with a bullet wound on the side of it’s temple. Time then continues as normal but in reverse, through a montage of street views we see time unwind, until situating us back about a month prior. Here we find Dan, again, in a passing car with his partner “Big Policeman” (working title) returning from a crime scene,  loud music playing from the radio. This brings us into the car scene which establishes Dan’s relationship with his partner and superior, Big P. Big P is wearing his iconic hat and is angry at Dan for interfering with and in his eyes ruining the interviews carried out at the crime scene. Fueled with rage he drives fast, eyes locked on the road. Dan meanwhile is feeling rather down, his eyes dart longingly. Seeming in response an angel appears, Devlin crawls from the cassette player. Immediately Dan reaches for his gun and sets off a few shots, destroying the radio and forcing Devlin to retreat. “If you didn’t like the music you could’a just said” Big P shouts. End Scene.

 

We have identified that a key aspect of a thriller opening is the first scene being seemingly unrelated and unexplainable before being recontextualised as the narrative unfolds. For example, The Net features a wholly unrelated scene in its opening which is later explained as being part of the wider conspiracy element of the plot. Rather than have ours link into a wider conspiracy, it will link into the psychological elements of the plot and how we use the trope of the unreliable narrator.

 

We are also very interested in using advanced creative techniques in our filmmaking process. We plan to use motion tracking to animate Devlin, a computer generated character, and then composite him within the scene. To achieve this goal we have acquired a Kinect capable of motion tracking, this in tandem with open-source software will allow us to animate a 3D scanned person. This will result in fluid, potentially realistic resizing of characters on screen as opposed to the use of green screen which may appear stiff and unrealistic. Drawing from another genre specific element We will accompany Devlin’s appearances will be a short musical motif; composed of static and harsh chimes.

 

Overall, I hope we have piqued your interest in our proposal and are as enthusiastic about its creation as we are.