Changes and developments to my thriller

Changes and developments to my thriller

We wanted to make sure our thriller would be effective and our audience would understand the plot. This is when we began to question how we would approach our thriller. We thought of a second idea which would include a similar idea of a high school massacre but we thought of other ways to film the opening sequence and how to end the sequence.

For our initial idea, we were going to film a variety of shots which would follow the killer around the school filming from different angles. This would be effective because it shows a wide use of shots and a clear understanding of our target audience and what they want to see in a thriller. We came up with a different idea in which we would use the school cafe. We would have children sitting around tables having fun with their friends filming each other on phones and then the killer walks in and kills them. We would therefore use point of view shots from the victims which would give a realistic emphasis to the sequence. However, we thought that this  would limit us to the locations we could kill people in. Therefore, we decided to stick with the original idea and push it really hard by using a number of locations around the school and paying close attention to the angles we were using and the shot type.

Another vital part to our opening sequence that was disputed was how we were going to end the sequence. We wanted to use the effect of leaving it on a cliff hanger as this keeps the audience guessing and makes them want to see what happens next, or in our storyline who? and why? Our initial idea was to have a guy playing basketball and the killer walks into the sports hall where the guy is playing and the guy says something similar to "is it done?". As this shocks the audience because they are likely to think the killer is about to kill him but then it turns out they're working together. One of my group members is a basketball fanatic and is quite forceful and not the easiest to get along with. He was adamant that basketball had to be included. Personally, I thought the second idea we came up with was better. I had the idea of instead of the killer walking into the sports hall, in fact he walks into a classroom and a teacher asks "is it done?". The only problem with this is that it puts the teenager in more control that the teacher, which is not believable.