Opening Sceneration - Miss Miller
Opening Narrative
The film Eternal is a revenge driven thriller which follows a woman's story
after being left at the altar on her wedding day. After being left by her
fiancée, she isolates herself from the outside world, the audience views her
deteriorating mental state. From the pain she has suffered she plots revenge on
her ex-fiancée slowly killing everybody close to her.
The film opens with the woman in
her room, sitting on her bed, she looks distraught and her makeup is ruined
from tears. We decided to use a mid-level shot to get both her wedding dress and
the surroundings in to introduce the negative atmosphere in the beginning.
There is suddenly a flashback to a scene of both the bride-to-be and the
bride's best friend getting ready for the wedding, with happy music in the
background to exert this. This was filmed in the style of a handheld camera to
create a sense of realism within the scene. The flashback ends and we are back
in the present, the woman writes over the decorations with deathly messages
such as R.I.P. We used close ups so that the audience could read the writing on
the balloons. There is suddenly another flashback with the men getting prepared
for the wedding, again in the style of a wedding video with handheld cameras,
we are introduced to all the victims. The flashback ends and the bride-to-be
gets out a photo-album, crossing off the faces of each person who attended the
wedding. We used close ups and a POV camera angle so that the audience could
see in the eyes of the killer. When she crosses off their faces there is a
brief flashback that indicates that the person has been killed, we decided not
to include any actual scenes of anybody getting killed as this would not look
as good and we also wanted the audience to be able to come to their conclusion
by themselves thus using kuleshov effect. The film cuts a few weeks in the
future when the bride puts a circle around the ex-husband's face, the
ex-husband is with the bride's best friend and it is evident that they are now
a couple and he has run off with her, we used a two man mid-level shot for this
scene to get both characters in. The ex-husband goes to the toilet, as he walks
up the stairs there is a high angle to indicate that this person is inferior
and a victim. As he opens the door to leave to his surprise he sees his
ex-fiancée brandishing a knife, this is an over the shoulder shot and we can
see both the victim and the killer in the shot.
There are several elements that
could improve our thriller and make it become more conventional:
Less dialogue - I had the idea of
removing some of the dialogue within our thriller as usually there is less dialogue
and more things occurring on the screen as it draws the audience in and is not
boring. Our thriller opening however has a majority of talking and is more
boring than we would have wanted, thus we will replace the dialogue with eerie
sounds or violence.
Credits - Our credits drastically
need improvement as they are not conventional to a thriller film, we must make
them less colourful and change the font to make them scarier. We will take
inspiration from the credits of the movie Seven as I have previously stated in
another post.
Irrelevance – We were informed that certain parts of our thriller were
irrelevant and thus we must cut out some scenes within the opening as it only
confuses the audience, and this is not what we wanted to do.
You have provided a good but brief summary of your opening scene. Think of it as a frame by frame recount of your sequence, where you need to mention the cinematography, sound, editing etc. used at each stage; no need for explanations.
ReplyDelete1) Do it as a frame by frame recount of your storyboard
2) Mention the micro-elements used
3) Tell the story, don't analyse it