Ideas for the thriller

This is a mindmap of some of the ideas that i came up with for my thriller. I started off thinking about the plot of my film, i decided on the idea of a man being obsessed about kidnapping and murdering young, inocent children. For my film i will be focusing on one perticular child (Ellie, the young actress). The film will be showing how he kidnapped her and how he was so obsessed with her. After deciding on the plot line of the film i could then start putting in the ideas for the opening sequence. I decided that for the soundtrack i would use a nursery ryme and make it sound very creepy and slow. I thought that this would be a good idea because it will go with the theme of the film as it's about children. However, i found that the nursery ryme was not giving the right effect on the opening sequence that i wanted, it did not create tension and excitment which i wanted the audience to feel. Instead i decided to just go with a heavy based instrument playing low that creates tension to the opening sequence, as the sequence gets furthur towards the end the music will build up to create excitment and to make the audience feel anxious. Some of the other sounds you will hear in the opening sequence will be giggling of the children, this will be non-digetic sound, i felt that this would make the opening seem a lot more creepy and it would go with the theme of the children. I got my idea for this opening sequence after i watched the opening sequence of se7en. I really liked how it was giving you quick flashes of what you were going to expect to see in the film, this is how i wanted my opening sequence to look like because it created tension and made you want to carry on and watch the rest of the film. Se7en also gave me the idea for the plot of my film as it was about a murderer, so i decided to take some of my ideas from this film which is how i came up with the child murderer. I thought that one of the props the man could be holding in the sequence was a book full of pictures of all his victums. I was firstly just going to have a book full of pictures of the one child (Ellie) but it would have been hard to find loads of pictures of one girl so instead i decided to have pictures of all his victums to show that he has done this horrible crime before. The will also anger the audience as they would not like the fact that he has been getting away with doing the crime, so it will add tension and make the audience on edge and it will make them want to carry on and watch the film as they want to see if he will get caught or not. When we see a picture of the character Ellie in the book (black and white) the screen will then quickly edit to a flash back of her playing at the park (colour). I decided that when we see Ellie happy and safe this part will be in colour but whenever we see the man in his house it will turn black and white. This will show the audience the difference between the places that are good, safe and happy for Ellie and the places where Ellie will be very unhappy and unsafe. It will also show that the man is very dangerous as he is always shown in black and white. For the credits i decided that they would be flicking between the shots randomly every now and then on a black screen. I again got this idea from the film se7en, i thought the flickering of the credits made them look scary and they stood out. I was going to have the girl laying on a matress looking scared in one of the shots to show the audience that this is what the girl will look like when she gets kidnapped by the man. However, it would have been hard to find a matress to put in a dirty garage so we decided to cut this shot out of the opening sequence. Also we didn't want the audience to know that the girl did get kidnapped, we wanted them to want to watch the film and find out for themseleves. The whole of this opening sequence will have a black screen behind whatever is going on, this makes it creepy, dark and mysterious.