Brainstorming and Ideas for Plot

         

        Today in class we are really focusing on the specifics of the story that we are going to base the opening on. On my last blog posts I mentioned that we were interested in making a psychological thriller; however, the story we are coming up with has less of a psychological aspect and more of just thriller and drama aspects. We took some inspiration from the movie Gone Girl (2014) I mentioned on my last post and a specific scene in this movie that depicts the main character changing her appearance because she is escaping her life. Including these shots of her cutting and dyeing her hair, applying darker make up and changing her clothing create a sense of mystery and a question of "why?" that would develop our purpose very nicely if we took inspiration from it. 

 

        Essentially, we came up with the idea of making our opening about a girl who leaving her old life behind. She really is not content it and is doing something about it. It would begin by having her go to a gas station and purchasing items to change her look. We want to include a scene in the gas station bathroom in which the girl is using all of the products she purchased to change her look drastically, like the scene from Gone Girl. We think that beginning the opening with this action will hook viewers from the start and start to create questions as to who this person is and why she’s doing this. At the same this is going on, we wanted to utilize crosscutting to scenes of a funeral, at which it is revealed that the girl we see at the gas station is supposedly “dead.” That’s what we have so far for brain storming; we hope that this sequence helps us create mystery as well as suspense towards what the girl is going to do next.

        In view of changing our approach, i decided to do some more research on movies that are both dramas and thrillers instead of psychological thrillers. Drama is a genre that focuses on creating realistic representations of events that happen in real life, and are very character driven. Some popular movies in this genre include Whiplash (2014), Little Women (2019), and The Holdovers (2023). I believe that the story we are going for will focus a lot on the character and her development, so this is why i want to draw inspiration from these genres. However, more specific examples of drama/thriller movies are Pulp Fiction (1994), Promising Young Woman (2020), and Knives Out (2019). 

        Specifically, i liked the opening scene for Promising Young Woman (2019) because, like we want to do with our own opening, i leaves the viewer wondering who the character is and what happened to them by showing her walking down a street in the early morning looking disheveled and bloody, but calmly eating breakfast. This is unusual behavior, just like changing your appearance drastically in a gas station bathroom, so i believe we could really draw some good inspiration from this opening. I also really enjoyed the font of the credits and title, as well as the music, so i will definitely be looking into that in further research.