Planning characters - Miss Miller

The purpose of having characters in our opening sequence is so that they can act out our narrative and to help the audience relate to the sequence. Therefore increasing the tension. And it will allow them to follow the narrative easier, which will make it more understandable for the audience.

The first character that we are going to include in our opening sequence is a victim. The victim is going to be played by Kerry Boyne, who is a member in our group, as she will be able to understand the narrative which will make it easier when filming and also she has the correct look for the role. She will be a 16 year old female, with dark hair and pale skin. She will be wearing a white dress and no shoes, this will emphasise her innocence which is a common convention in thrillers.She orginally would not have bee wearing the white dress but the killer would have changed her into as this is what he kills all of his victims in. The audience will be able to see this common dress between the victims when the polaroid photos are show, as all of the victims will be wearing it.  She will have a very normal background, this will make her relatable to our target audience as she will share many similarities with them. Therefore they will put themselves into her place. Which will increase the tension and suspense throughout the sequence. She is your stereotypical victim as she is unaware that she is going to be killed and just happens to find herself in a bad situation. The audience will be able to relate to this as this is something that commonly happens to people when they find themselves in the wrong situtation at the wrong time. However not to the extent of them being killed.

Our antagonist (being played by Eddie Woodley) is going to be a male in his 20's. He will have a large, over powering body build, this will show his physical advantage over the victim. The clothing that we have chosen for him to wear will be a black tracksuit, this will cover his body completely and the black colour will symbolise morbidness. He also will be wearing latex gloves, these gloves are worn during operations, so this could symbolise that he is planning to kill her. Which will increase the tension. The most key part of his costume will be the mask that the killer is going to wear. This will conceal his identity through out the sequence, which will build up the sense of enigma, this will increase the suspense. A mask is a common convention used in thrillers, the killer identity is normally never revealed or left until the last minute to reveal the killer identity. It is very rare within thrillers that the victim will find out the identity of a killer wearing a mask. The key characteristics that our killer is going to have are his dominant and obsessiveness over young females. And his scary psychotic nature. This is all due to his abusive childhood, where his mother use to abuse him and he lived in horrendous circumstances. This all lead to him being a wanted child serial killer. We are going to portray him as your stereotypical thriller killer as when he is chasing the victim through the forest he is going to be walking slowly and confidently, this will show his dominance and that he is sure he will re-capture the victim. This builds up the tension as the audience do not know when he is going to catch up with her but they no he does at some point. The audience are going to be able to build a relationship with the killer as we will be sharing his deeply troubled past which will make the audience feel sympathetic but it will also make the killer dominant over the audience as he will use there sympathy to his advantage to create tension. Therefore the audience will feel fear towards the killer.

There will be some Polaroid photos of past victims hanging up on the wall that the killer is looking at. These past victims will all be young females around the same age as the current victim (16). The fact they are all the same age group as our target audience will mean that the audience will be able to relate more with them and put themselves and there friends into the places of the girls that have been killed. Which will allow them to build up a relationship with them. They will all have dark hair as this is how the killer choses who he is going to kill. He choses the girls that most resemble his abusive mother, as he is taking out all of the hatred for his mother on other young girls. All of the girls will have a very average background and there will not be anything specific (apart from looking like his mother) that makes the killer chose them as his victims. These are very stereotypical victims as firstly they are young females, which emphasises that the killer will be physically stronger. Also they are all unaware that they are going to be killed.

The characters that my group and I have chosen to use in our opening sequence are very conventional to the thriller genre as they share features of the killers and victims we have seen while researching into the genre. Some of these features are the dominant nature of the killer and the concealed identity of him. As this creates a sense of fear and enigma. Also the innocence and vulnerability of the current and past victims and how they was not expecting the killing. By using these common conventions that we saw when researching the thriller genre, we hope that the sequence will be easily recognisable as a thriller. It is helpful that we planned our characters prior to filming our opening sequence as we were able to go into great detail about what the characteristics are of the characters are going to be and what they are going to wear. This will make it easier when filming out opening sequence as we will know what we wanted our characters to look like, therefore we will have more direction when filming.