Week 1: Final Project - Initial Plans

   I am working with Olivia Courtright on my Component 1 Project. Our initial plan was that we both knew we wanted to do a horror/ thriller film for our final so at the beginning of the Olivia came up with this scary idea where a girl is covered in blood walking down a street and a truck starts coming at her from behind and she faces her destiny. During this time, I was able to discover an abandoned casino/ dog track over by Booker High School that we could use for part of our filming since it was a cool setting for a horror movie. Now that it has come time to start planning, we decided to mix these two ideas into our film. I also figured it may be interesting to show an anxious character being chased by something in the abandoned building to add suspense to the movie, so we also made to incorporate that into our film. When it was time to putting our plans on paper, I was gone for two days out of town to visit family, so Olivia took initiative and planned out some of the movie plot with our ideas. When I got back, we worked on what we liked and what other things we should add or change and the different camera angles we could incorporate.

    With the idea Olivia had originally, and mine of the abandoned building we fit it in our film by having it start with a girl drenched in blood walking down the street. Her hair clumped together from the blood and faintly limping down the street. It's gloomy and dark, as lamps are illuminating her face and her background settings. A truck slowly turns the corner with its headlights on and just starts coming at her. She faces her back towards the camera and stares at the headlights just coming straight at her. While this is happening, we added a sad monologue with the girl talking about something sad. We did this to add more suspense and cause the audience to ask questions. After the quote ends the movie just slowly starts growing in reverse (she walks backwards, car disappears, etc.) to the “beginning” of the movie and it's the main characters birthday. She has all her close friends over, and she is either wearing a red or black dress while her friends are wearing all white or something a little fancier. When she blows out the candles that could quickly transition to a different scene where she is having a good time with everyone and laughing. At the end of the night, she says good night to her friends as they all leave. She immediately goes to the bathroom and loudly closes the door. The camera then goes through the door to see her puking, while the camera focuses on the counter it shows a bloody razor blade and that gives the audience knowledge of herself harming and having an eating disorder (since she is puking up all the food, she ate that night). After she is done puking intense music starts playing and her little sister knocks on the door loudly. They leave the house and all the girls from the birthday party meet up at this abandoned building and they start going into it looking around with their flashlights. Once the girls walk down the hallway the camera just stays there until it focuses on the man creepily standing in the back of the hallway. He ends up killing everyone which would be further in the movie (we are not filming that).  

    We are going to approach this project by making a list of everything we need and then work our way to get them. We have to work on the different camera angles we will use and different techniques or transitions. We will talk a lot more about the different editing techniques we will use once we are done filming. We have to go into this project with our idea and stick to it. On our last project we started changing different things throughout the process of filming and it was horrible, and we took way to long trying to make it perfect. For this project we have to realize that it won't be perfect and will plan out which days we will film certain scenes and stick to that. We still have to cast people but I'm sure our friends would love to do this. We also have to get the lighting correctly this time. Last time we had to make a film the sun was setting, and it changed every day we filmed so it was a little off in the end. I think this time we will film the birthday party in the day but the haunted building in the dark so then we won't have to worry about the sky changing all different colors every day. Plus, the birthday scenes will be inside, so the lighting of the house lamps shouldn't change. We also have to go into this project making sure we have a lot of time to edit because we didn't last time and that was an issue. We have to plan a lot and not just have a faint idea for this project, like last time.