Personal Opinion On Opening Sequence

I think that our idea will work well as hopefully the ending will create suspense and will make the audience want to watch more. The fact that the genre of our film is thriller is good because we are able to choose between a lot of different ideas and change it wherever or whenever we need to. Our storyline at the moment is quite interesting but we will need to check with other people to check if they will be interested in the film or not. I think there are a couple of weaknesses though, but if we can film it right then they will be solved. For example we do not want to confuse the audience with the storyline and we need to make sure that they understand the role of the man and the girl. We also need to make the audience realise what the man has to do with the girl and what he is doing. I think our opening sequence will create enigma and make the audience want to watch the rest of the film. 

Opening Sequence Idea

After brainstorming many different ideas for our opening sequence we came up with a final one:
The genre of it will be a thriller. It starts off with a young teenage girl who is in a friends house babysitting. The next scene is a man sitting in his car, but you cannot see what he looks like or what he is doing in the car. You then find out that the man is stalking this young girl, and his car/van is full of photos of her in different places doing different things. The man has installed cameras into the girls garden like CCTV which will be shown using black and white effect. You will be shown him watching her through the CCTV cameras in his car. You then go back to the girl sitting at home doing nothing, when you hear the doorbell. She gets up and opens the door and greets the man. It then cuts to the title of film and any credits needed. Hopefully this will create suspense for the audience and make them want to watch even more and find out what happens next. 

Group Discussions 17/12/12

Mind mapping the ideas for possible storylines
In today's lesson me, Rianna and Kiah thought of some different storylines we could use for our opening sequence. We also came up with a group name of 'Phoenix Productions' and made the group blog for that. We have already chosen the genre of either a horror or a thriller film so we worked our ideas around that. We decided that we wanted our protagonist and antagonist to be teenage girls as this would suit our target audience or 15-24. We decided we wanted to include an abduction of a young girl. Possible the antagonist would turn out to be a stalker. We have not started storyboarding yet but next lesson we plan to start. Photos of this lesson and our notes will be placed onto the group blog. 

Gender Representation in Horror and Thriller

In horror and thriller films both genders are stereotyped.

Male

The male in a horror or thriller film usually plays the strongest character. They play tough characters and show very less emotion. The hero of the film will usually be played by a man. They tend to take on very active roles in these types of movie and we focus more on the males actions. Males are portrayed as much more dominant in the media and around 20 years ago the men outnumbered women 2:1. You usually have males of all ages in films whereas you normally only get young women in films. The male will sometimes have a sexual attraction about him, including a good physique. They play an independent character who does everything by themselves, this is known as the 'lone hero'. Men usually take the role as a team leader, so this makes them very brave. In films such as 'Taken', Liam Neeson plays the main character trying to find his daughter. He leads everything and shows himself as a brave character by doing everything he can to get his daughter back. He is also shown as very intelligent being able to find her, and his wife is shown as clueless and doesn't do much to help.  We focus on the males actions more and study what they are doing in more detail. 

Female

Females are portrayed in a very different way to men, in horror and thriller films. They can sometimes be seen as an 'object' in films, mainly sexually and emotionally orientated. They are always presented as beautiful and much more emotional compared to men. They take the role as a helper, they are never usually the leader of a group. We often see women in the nude, or wearing very revealing clothes whereas we never usually see men like that. The main female protagonist can turn into the final girl and are therefore present until the end of the film. Women are usually seen alone in horror films. You usually see young female actresses, unlike men where you have a range of ages. The 'final girl' is always the 'virginal girl' and sometimes slightly masculine. Usually there names are unisex  and they dress quite masculine compared to the other glamorous actresses who are usually injured or killed. Such as in the film 'Halloween' the 'final girl' is called Laurie which is a unisex name. She is conveyed as virginal and innocent, she also dresses quite masculine.