Updated Treatment

Our film opening is based around an unknown stalker, the changing of our plot to this instead of a group of girls being stalked changed our title to 'The Unknown'. Even though this plot may seem cliché our opening will be edited together in a unique way through not only the stalker following our main character but looking at pictures of her and single shots of the stalker by themselves.

The aim of our opening is to entice the audience into watching the rest of the film. It will raise various issues of possible revenge, fear and confinement. It should make the audience feel scared and keep them sympathetic to the victim throughout the opening.

The opening is set in different time slots and is edited using different parts particularly in the first half of the opening. It cuts between the character sleeping and the camera focussing on the stalker creating a juxta position as well as tension. The second half shows the present and would be continued in the present after the main title appears at the end of the opening. Instead of a continous sequence we decided on using the technique of cross cutting as this is less likely to lose our audience's attention. As a group we have decided not to include dialogue as we found this was hard to record clearly whilst filming and may become unclear. Through researching various thriller openings like Seven, Mimic etc we thought that having a non diegetic self created music clip over our footage would create more tension and would be easier to make it seem more thriller like.

Our original idea was to have four characters and one stalker, however we reconsidered after deciding that too many characters were in our opening. We found that it seems more thriller like to have more focus on two characters, a victim and a stalker. They are both acted by females, however the stalker appears to be male as from our questionnaire we found that male stalkers were more scary. We often stereotype males to be more aggressive, violent, scary and generally bigger in size than women which I think is the main reason males are generally stalkers as opposed to women. This picture is from the film 'Silence of the Lambs' in which this shot shows a male stalking/ watching the woman.

We chose to set our opening in two different locations. As we don't have a budget of where we can film, we couldn't hire out a hall, corridor or anywhere else as this would've cost too much. So we decided to film in a group members house. This includes the scene where the victim is sleeping, where the stalker is taking down pictures and when the girl walks out of the house. We also decided to film in the local park as this was easily accessible, free and even made our thriller film more captivating as the fact it's set in a public place makes our opening seem more realistic and part of every day life with a twist.

Throughout filming it is vital that the mise en scene is constantly being thought about and altered. We used a white hoodie for the stalker to wear contrasting with the background particularly in the park so that the audience is clear on the key character and focus on the importance of the character. When shooting at first we found a lot of our footage was dark and we had to make sure we constantly kept enough light whilst keeping to the thriller genre. We used one of our group members bedroom as the colour pink is often associated with an innocent girl and this was the character type we want our audience to feel.

Our target audience is still the same as the original treatment. Even though we decided to change the overall plot of the film, we made sure that this was done through sticking to the same target audience as this is who we wanted to appeal to and as a group we feel as if we can relate more to this audience.