Idea Development

After many long discussions we were able to come up with 3 main ideas for our thriller. These were:

• Stalker and psychological themed thriller where a young girl is sifting through her fathers things and comes across pictures of girls with their names and addresses on the back. She then types the names into google and is shown missing person reports connected with these women. 
  

• Horror and Mystery Thriller where a daughter of a middle class family is home alone and puts on her old family videos, however during one of the videos it cuts out and shows a horrific murder involving a family member.
  
• Drama and Action Thriller where an ex cop wakes up in a strange building that has been trashed, but all the windows and doors are locked. He has cuts and bruises all over him and he seems to be alone.
  

We considered the pros and cons of each idea and found that some routes we would want to take were just impossible in the time frame and budget we were working with. Also we considered what location we could use for our thriller as that was a main factor that affected which idea we chose. For example, for the third idea we needed full reign on an empty building our house to film in. This building would have to be completely trashed for it to be realistic and unfortunately this wasn’t viable. We also wanted to do something that had not necessarily been done many times before and felt that this was the case for the second Horror and Mystery idea. Therefore we decided to go for the first idea. We thought this was a very good idea as it has not been done too many times before and we thought we could really put our own spin on it. We also were able to think of possible props, actors and locations very quickly. We thought that this idea could be very interesting both for us to film and most importantly for the audience. Psychological Thrillers can be very gripping and full of mystery and suspense so we had to think of a way to incorporate these vital elements. As this was my idea I tried to think of different avenues we could take in order to make it believable and still include those thriller elements that were very important to the genre. We decided to set in a middle class family with a nice house, nice car possibly a dog to set the scene of a normal ‘happy’ family. We had to think of possible transitions to tell the story correctly and came up with the idea that the daughter is doing her homework when her father returns from work. We wanted there to be a very distinct divide between the authority of the parent and the respect given by the daughter because of this. We then came up with the idea that she needs to take her birth certificate into school the next day but before she knows it her father has popped out again. She decided to have a look around her parent’s room and whilst shuffling above the wardrobes a box falls down and out falls all the pictures of the girls. She then types one of the names into google to figure out what is going on. Once we were happy with this idea, we started thinking about props and possible locations and actors. We decided to give each other set roles and things to think about before filming day began. I focused on props and the location.

shanice x