Initial Ideas

As our group sat down and started to discuss ideas for our short film we struggled to decide on a specific genre. We first narrowed it down to doing a drama, horror, thriller or psychological film, we then thought of an idea where a man stands on the edge of a cliff looking over, the audience would see the surroundings from his point of view and would be left wondering why he was there. We were then going to have him commit suicide, and show the lead up as to why. However with much discussion we decided that not only was this a highly predictable concept that’s been done many times before, but we knew we could improve the idea. The second idea was that rather than a man, we would use a child, who would fall from the cliff when chasing after her dog that had got away. As this happens the screen would cut to black and we would just hear the diegetic sound of the dog barking and the mum, who was on the beach, screaming. This idea would have started with a close up of the little girl’s hand laying on the rocks with the sea crashing against her, the thoughts behind this idea, came from the notion that a small girl falling to her death was a shocking concept for the audience and would leave them “horrified”. However, realistically this idea was near impossible to achieve and was a random scene with no real plotline.
This is when we came up with our current idea, which falls into the hybrid genre of a psychological horror; we will shadow the life of a girl between the ages of 15 and 18. Our first scene will be of a man cutting up pictures of a young girl. We will then see her taking some tablets this immediately hints to the audience that she has some kind problem/illness. Next the young girl will be looking in her bathroom mirror and will see a man standing behind her but when she turns around there’s no one there, the audience won’t know if there really was a man there or if she’s going mad. Just before this scene we will see the psycho man’s hands removing her tablets and replacing them with his. The girl then takes the tablets and becomes dizzy and faints, we will have a point of view shot from the girl on the floor, looking at the man’s feet walking towards her. Throughout the film the audience will not see the man’s face. In the next scene the girl will wake up in a dark room where there will be another girl, to show that this is not the first time he has kidnapped someone. The film will end with a repeat of the first scene, the man cutting up pictures of another girl, giving the impression that it’s a cycle that will keep going round.