My Thriller Idea, The Pitch & Getting Into Groups

When we were asked to do our pitches I asked to go first and get my pitch over and done with. I got a lot positive feedback and also a bit of constructive criticism which has help me develop my idea along with helping me with doing my presentations, that I do in the future, better. The lesson after all of the presentations had been pitched we were put into our groups. There are three groups in my class and in my group there is four of us (Callum Henderson, Lola Gazzola, Anna Farish and I) and we have come up with a final idea which we can do our test shoot on. We are expecting lots of constructive criticism from other teacher, including my own, and we will take it and use it to develop our idea making it better. Our group has bonded very well as none of us don't get on and we are all quite confident in our ideas. We made a mind map of ideas for our opening sequence and came to a conclusion.

My Idea for Thriller Sequence

After being able to look over both my initial ideas for my Thriller sequence I have come to the conclusion of choosing "initial idea two":

This idea is based about a crime thriller and it starts off with a rising shot of a woman, stereotypically, in 'her' kitchen cooking some sort of meat, a very bloody meat. The shot will reach her face after seeing her bloody hands with gloves. She will hear dogs bark from outside, she will pause completely and stare up, looking blank at the camera (this will hopefully put the audience in an ambiguous situation, making them feel uncomfortable). The woman's face will then cut to a shot of the dogs back and salivating outside, through a glass door which has their spit and saliva all over it. Then the camera will pan across the room from the dogs back to the woman, who is cooking, and in the transition there will be an open cupboard or door which clearly has something inside, the thing that the dogs were making noise about. The panning of the camera will reach the woman's hands again (but they will have frozen, as well as her face (sill)).  There will then be another rising shot of in front of the woman's arms to her blank face. as this transition is happening there will be a build up of non-diegetic sound and then it will stop, when it stops the woman will continue cutting the meat. As the shot of her face cuts to a black screen you hear a gun shot a a whimper of a dog, leaving the audience thinking about what the meat was and what type of person this stereotypical housewife is.

This has been edited as I have had to to adapted it making it a lot more descriptive and powerful for the audience.
I have come up with an outline for this idea of my thriller sequence (coursework):
This woman in the kitchen is seen, at the start, to be a normal housewife cooking dinner as the usual but after the audience hears the gunshot and the whimpering of the dog they might start to question the type of meat that she is cooking. The plot of this sequence could be that she is some sort of murderer/serial-killer.

Analysis of the Preliminary Task

After filming my preliminary task my partner (Harvey) and I finalised the piece through Adobe Flash Player. Adobe Flash Player is freeware software for using content created on the Adobe Flash platform, including viewing multimedia, executing rich Internet applications, and streaming video and audio. The sequence that we made was about 30 seconds and spent about an hour doing this. We started off with the names on a piece of paper (Harvey Write, Millie Pike and I) we then moved into a shot from behind Harvey as he walked into the room whilst, aggressively, pushing open the door.as he walked in there was then a wide show of Harvey and Millie talking. We then moved the camera into an over the shoulder shot, facing Millie, showing her talking. We left the camera in the same shot as Harvey starts to speak as we didn't want the audience to feel as if they were in an ambiguous situation. As Millie started to reply to Harvey we showed a close up of Millie’s face as she try's to defend herself against Harvey. I chose to put in a shot which just showed both of them on either side of the screen, to show the slitting of each character, with just half of their body showing. Belly-button up. We then moved into an over the shoulder shot showing Harvey telling Millie that he “can’t wait for” her. Then there was a shot, which Millie chose, of his feet moving away from the conversation to the door, to leave. There was then an extreme close up of Harvey’s face, building tension, and him saying that he “won’t wait for” her. We then bought back the shot of being outside and used it as Harvey leaves the room and as the door closed. We moved back inside to show Millie’s reaction after he left. This was a close up of Millie’s face which shows her biting her nails and this represents her feeling anxious of what Harvey just said to her. This shot was also trying to show that she is thinking about what to do next.

This process it was quite challenging as Harvey and I had to do a lot of cutting and changing that camera angles to represent who to listen to at each sentence of the preliminary task. Millie wasn't apart of our group as we split up to create another preliminary task which is quite different but the same footage was used for both of our creations.