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.