Initial Planning - Choosing An Idea

In order to build a captive story for the audience, we will need to put as much information into two minutes as possible to hook the viewer, therefore we decided to use a montage technique for our opening. We will use a non-linear narrative as it will jump backwards and forwards in time through the use of flashbacks and flash forwards. We will use these flashbacks to confuse the audience and add mystery to the opening. This will conform to Barthes enigma code.

We decided the narrative will follow two characters who are close friends. Our main character (character 1) will be the main focus of the plot. Our opening will show a montage of character one transforming from a happy, sociable relatable teenager girl to a damaged, vacant empty shell of who she used to be. The second character, her close friend, will play a large part in her decline as it will show scenes of fights between the two as she gradually becomes more distant. The montage will follow both the girls through happy uplifting memories to eventually dark and tormenting fights and dark lonely memories following the disappearance of the second character. The loss of the best friend will make the audience question whether she was real of just a hallucination, this conforms to the genre stereotype.

This mood board shows a visual representation of my film opening:

Our opening will have an open narrative as the audience will not be completely confident at the end of the opening what was real and what wasn't. The audience will question the existence of the friend, whether she was there or was a fabrication of the first characters imagination. This is appropriate for our opening as it will keep the audience watching, there would be no reason to watch if they had all the answers.