Coming to Conclusions

The day before we had to present out thriller ideas, our group had yet to decide upon an idea, so we all met for a good few hours to think it through and in those hours, we finally had a brainwave.

We got chatting about conspiracy theories, something which we’re all interested in and I’ve always been interested in Third World countries; I’ve researched it, done speeches about it and, last year, went on an aids trip to Uganda. Whilst there, we found that there is a very obvious divide between the very rich and the very poor, so I thought our thriller could be a possible explanation of why this is happening.

I have a piece of footage from that trip, where about 8 English students are playing with about 25 Ugandan children under and parachute. We all lifted it up and rushed underneath and I have a  film of this from our perspective – as if the viewer is under the parachute as well. All the colours are vivid and the camera is almost spinning and you can see the English and Ugandan people playing happily together. Similar to this, however the parachute is a lot smaller so you can see people's expressions. Also, I suggested we edit it so it's bright and vivid, like a dream-like memory.

 

 I suggested we use this piece of footage as the opening with a non-diegetic voiceover, which sets the scene and presents the happy side of Africa. The voiceover narrates what’s going on, but has a dark tone so the audience knows something’s amiss, suggesting the darker side of Africa and therefore the conspiracy is foreshadowed.

We all liked this idea and developed the second section of the opening sequence to show one of the students being abducted because she found out the secret. We talked about the idea and got into more depth about the shots we’d use and finally decided that this is the idea that we’re all interested in and would like to put forward.

To pitch the idea, we all created aspects of a powerpoint, which I animated and compiled. It was quite wordy, however when we presented the idea it was verbally communicated and the powerpoint was more of a prompt for us.

The idea behind the thriller is to suggest to the audience they should look a little deeper into society, something which we are all interested in doing.