RESEARCH/NEW IDEAS

Hey, I'm back with some fun new ideas!

I'm a little ahead of schedule and think I have my idea...but this blog post is not about that so you'll have to wait (sorry).

Like I said in my last blog post, I was curious about whether I wanted my film opening to be a found-footage film or something just based around the forest area I found. So, to decide I did research on both things. Dashcam is a movie about a girl who is on live stream and captures these weird supernatural events in her life. Although it isn't a found-footage film, it is a cool concept that I thought I should look into. I also came across this movie called Horror in the High Desert which revolves around a guy named Gary who among many other people in the U.S. mysteriously disappears in the woods. This one is not solely a found footage film as it shows his friends and family trying to find him, but I really liked the film opening. It is a time-lapse of what seems to be the Nevada desert in black in white, with clips of dead animals, and a voiceover of his friends and family seeming to be interviewed about his disappearance. I could not find a video with just the film opening on YouTube so I am unable to embed it or link it but I think I described it pretty well. Another thing that I liked about this film's opening is that, once the voiceover ends, a black screen is shown with facts about his disappearance and other facts about the events. This is also seen in the Blair Witch Project when it describes what the kids are doing. Here is an example.

Before I could do any more research, I talked to my teacher and she brought up a very good point. Found-footage films do not illustrate any knowledge of camera shots and angles, which is something that I do want to illustrate in my film opening. That being said, I stopped researching those types of films and started researching thrillers in general. Before I move on, I want to mention that although I am not doing found footage film, my research did bring me an idea that I want to incorporate into my film which is the black screen with white text after the distribution logos. I think this is a cool thing that is used in many horror/thriller movies and provides suspense and context simultaneously. Moving forward I did some research on one of my favorite movies Zodiac. The film opening of this movie is very long, but there are some things that I took away from it. Here's the film's opening. Although the topic of the movie is nothing similar to what I want to do, I like the opening because of the way that it introduces conflict. The film starts off happy and normal like most thrillers do, but after some introduction to the setting which is California, the conflict is introduced. A sketchy car parks behind the two kids and then drives away. The car then returns and parks behind them so they can't move. The driver gets out of the car and shines a flashlight at them so they can't see and then shoots them, introducing a character vs. character conflict. This is what I want to do except there will be no killing, and it is not a murder. One thing that I was curious about was some general genre conventions of a thriller. North Dakota South University says "A good thriller puts the hero in danger early and never lets up... Thrillers tend to want to be small. It's like putting your hero in a box and squeezing. One of the advantages of this narrowing of focus is that thrillers maximize emotion." This is something I definitely want to look into. No matter what type of thriller I end up doing, I want the feeling of suspense to be the same. I think the premise of my thriller will be about cults. I will make a blog post about the specifics next week but to put it simply: a group of friends is hanging out in the woods and they are kidnapped by a religious cult and forced to conform. There is a supernatural twist to it that I will explain later. 

After a lot of research, I've seen a lot of things that I would want to incorporate into my film, such as the black screen before credits saying something like "There are around 10,000 cults in the United States", introducing character vs. character conflict, and developing my opening by starting off normal and later building suspense. Next, I will introduce my idea, look into other genre conventions like music, credit types, and mise-en-scene elements and I will begin script writing. See you next time!