plot, story, & narrative...

Our next step in this entire process is to brainstorm ideas and come up with some sort of outline of how we want our film opening to look, and the story/theme that it will follow. We aren't able to see each other in real life because of our dear friend coronavirus, so we tried to go through this process in online meetings and interactive sites like Jamboard to create mind maps and plans. Initially, we each had some very basic ideas, but we had some problems in making decisions on which idea we should use and what elements of the other ideas to incorporate, so we decided to combine all of the ideas into one main one, making sure that everyone is happy and confident in this. This took a bit of work, and a lot of communication, but after a couple of artist blocks, we have some main ideas and a slight idea on how to incorporate them. I will now try my best to explain each idea and the elements that we extracted from them, including the final one.

This was the first idea. We wanted a chase scene where there's a lot of suspense and mystery because we have this person being chased, we see this through a combination of POV shots from the point of view of the person being chased, but also from the pov of the thing that's chasing them. We would also incorporate other shots from different angles (eg top of the stairwell looking down, or the bottom etc) We would use dark muted colors, keeping a creepy kind of unsettling vibe. We want to draw the viewers in with some confusion so they don't exactly understand what's going on or what the character is being chased by. We all really liked this idea but had a hard time deciding between this one and the other ones because we all liked each others ideas.

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I should add that we discovered a film opening that we all love and we know that we want to take inspiration from. It's from the movie "Killing Them Softly"

No matter which idea we choose, we are definitely going to take inspiration from the organisation of this particular film opening and the way that the scene gets interrupted with the classic film titles, and the way that the music cuts off.

The second idea is loosely based on this film opening but with our own creative twist..

This is also pretty similar to the chase idea but with a change of scenery and a little bit more elaborated. Maybe there's a story behind the picture frame? What are they running from? Are they actually running from something? We want there to be a strong sense of mystery as we found that this sort of theme draws people in the most and makes them want to see more in order to understand what's happening. We want to play with the viewer psychologically as well as look into the psychology of the character. We want to bring mental illness awareness into it as well, maybe the character is suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness and that's why they're running and acting erratically.

We had other small ideas but we decided against them and instead decided to draw inspiration from these two main ones. The main ideas that we know we're going to incorporate are: "killing them softly" opening style, some sort of chase/following, camera shaking/handheld POV vibe for part of it, and the overall theme of some sort of psychological issue.

So now that we had a couple of main ideas established, we decided to elaborate on them and make them more detailed in order to accurately visualize exactly what we want to do.

This was the final idea that we came up with. We tried to include the major details and main aspects in order to encapsulate the entire idea that we have so far. I will try my best to explain it now. So we want the first thing that the audience sees to be someone running down the stairs in an apartment building, being chased. When they open the door, they're suddenly placed in a forest and as they're running, the locations keep changing with time skips, so we see the light changing as well as small changes in the appearance of the character. At the end the person slows down and looks behind them, and sees himself as he realizes he's been running from his own imagination and he's been in his apartment all along.

For the title of the movie we wanted it to be one word, and we decided on the title "Relocation". We found it interesting, and that it leaves suspense and mystery for the viewer. The selling line is the definition of disassociation, which is "the mental process of disconnecting from one's thoughts, feelings, memories, or sense of identity". Which is basically what is happening to the main character during the opening. These are our basic ideas which we have decided upon so far, but we are still open to possible changes that we may make. We're all really looking forward to creating this, and hopefully some of the Covid restrictions will be lifted by the time we start filming.