Storyboarding the Thriller - Part 2

Back from the holidays, and the 2nd draft is complete! It feels good to actually have something that looks like a storyboard, although this one only shows every 3rd or 4th shot and is more of a visual reference to Courtney, who is doing the script. As the script is not yet complete, I think I may be doing a few more of these drafts before we get it to look anything like our final version. To the right is a scanned copy of the 4th page, just to give an idea to how it has changed compared to the last one. When they are all finished, I will try and scan all of the complete storyboards into one blog post, to see just how our ideas have progressed and changed.

Storyboarding the Thriller - Part 1

For our thriller, I was charged with creating the storyboard and piecing together all of the matched shots that we had thought up in the lesson previous to this, such as the burning photo/cigarette,and the cut from one photo to the same one in a different room. At the moment i think we hae 5 unique matched cuts, with a few repeats on objects. (mainly photos.) The image to the left is a section of the original sketched storyboard in which I used 2 sheets of A3 paper,(one for each room) and planned the shot like that. This was the most challenging part of storyboarding, as I had to actually visualise the shots in my head, and the effect we wanted the audience to get from each shot. 

Final Ideas Pitch

In this session, we got the whole group together and narrowed down our ideas to one each.

• My idea: was to set it in Peaslake, one of the boarding houses, and show how a seemingly harmless evening at a boarding house ends up with all the students dead the next morning, all killed in mysterious ways.

• Nina's idea: was about a teenage serial killer, who kills out of jealousy and is very methodical and messed up in the head.

• Sopia's idea: was to set the film in a police station, with a suspect being interviewed. The viewer would be partly watching on a CCTV camera, and see things that only the camera could detect.

• Courtney's idea: was about a girl who breaks down on a fairly deserted road, near a seemingly abandoned warehouse. The girl then goes inside and gets murdered. 

Once we had all presented our final ideas, we decided to vote on an idea, and we couldn't vote for our own. Nina's idea won it, but when we presented the idea to Matt and Luke, they said we needed to change a lot of it as our idea was unbelievable. So we changed the scenario to include matched cuts of her planning a kill to shots of her victim. Again we were told to scrap the idea, and we decided to change the story from a girl planning a murder to a couple that have had a violent break-up, and the scene is a foreshadow of events to come, i.e. the guy's murder.
Our new plot was much more popular and we felt that more of our audience would identify with it, as most people have gone through a break-up where they have felt either like Ellie, (violent, destructive, distraught) or like Matt, (doesn't really give a damn, little remorse).