Planning: Treatment For Our Film Opening

Once again, we made a Google Docs document to keep a track of all our ideas for the opening. 
Below are the screenshots of our notes and conversations.
My contribution is written in blue, Immy's - yellow and Emma's - purple.

 
 

Now, we can confidently say we know what we're doing (the overall idea, at least). Our plan for the opening two minutes is to show the killer, whose face is never actually shown to the audience, preparing for the first murder cross cutting to shots of the act being carried out. We're planning to use a series of mysterious close ups and match on action to add intensity to the scene and to never actually reveal the face of the killer or their victim. 

In terms of sound, we are considering non-diegetic piece by Camille Saint-Saens: Danse Macabre (which is a composition from the XIX century, so there won't be any copyright issues) playing during the scene after the killer puts on headphones. When it comes to diegetic sound, we won't have almost any during the playing of Danse Macabre, but before the killer equips headphones we want to use sounds such as very loud footsteps and heavy breathing through a gas mask. 

For the titles, we want to overlay them over the shots, since we will have a lot of footage (or at least we want to have a lot of different footage) to fit into the two minutes. For the actual title of the film, we want to make it a part of the environment. We were considering a wall neon that spells 'Toxic' (or something similar to a neon, since they're so expensive) and filming it flickering as the killer walks past it, to later put it at the end of our opening sequence. 

Planning: Target Audience and Potential Openings

After presenting our 60-second pitch, we (Emma in particular) wrote the synopsis for our film:

Far into the future, in the year 2XXX, twelve influential families dominate the city in which they live. Each one is designated with its own crest, deriving from the Chinese Zodiac Calendar; their adolescent heirs, all close friends, carry their family legacies. However, things quickly take a turn for the worst. One of the friends is discovered as a decomposing corpse in a pool of mysterious glowing toxin, and the only clue to the killer’s identity comes in the form of a fortune cookie. After that, it becomes a race against time. Isolated from any outside help, the friends must put the pieces together and stop the murderer – both their own lives, and that of the next generation, is at stake.


We then realised that feedback from our target audience would be necessary in order to make our piece of the highest possible quality and create an opening the audience would truly enjoy. In order to collect the data we created an online survey using SurveyMonkey and sent it to a group of fellow students from our school. Below is the data we have collected: 



We had a very good ratio of the two genders, meaning we were able
to compare two different points of view. 


Majority of our target audience does enjoy horror, meaning our film
would gain enough attention if it came out. 


Psychological and science-fiction were definitely the most popular
subgenre - good for us, because we planned 'Toxic' to fit
into both of these. 




Some of the suggestions we got were actually very creative
and would make for a good opening. 




The average was about 8.5!