Group planning - Miss Miller

My group consists of me, Meghan Stone and Kerry Boyne. Every week as a group we meet up so that  we can discuss the our ideas and figure out how we are going to create a successful thriller. We have to have these meetings every week so that we all know what we are planning to do and we can make sure that we all agree with what is going to happen within our opening sequence. Additionally, meeting up as a group will make it easier when filming as we will be more organised and we can discuss and evaluate what we are going to do as a group. Furthermore, we can develop our ideas to make sure we have maximum surprise, shock, suspense and tension. For example we was able to combine all of our individual narrative ideas to make a group narrative that we all agree on.

In our first group meeting we discussed what we wanted our narrative to be. Firstly, we discussed what our individual narratives where and where we all got our inspirations from. We done this as we wanted to consider everybody's ideas. We looked at the positive and negative parts of everybody's ideas so that we could choose parts of all of them we want to include as we wanted to use parts of everybody's narratives. We all share the similar aspect of an abandoned location therefore this was definitely going to be included in our opening sequence. Additionally, we all shared the same idea of a masked antagonist, therefore we are going to include this as well. As this adds to the enigma of the sequence and creates suspense. Our final narrative idea was a psychotic serial killer, who was abused as a child by his mother, and kills girls that looks like her to get revenge.

In the second group meeting we discussed all of the different miss-en-scene, editing, conventions, representation of characters, inspirations, cinematography and sound we are going to include in our opening sequence. We did not going into immense detail, however we did outline the everything we was going to include. We done one section at a time and we wanted to discuss it all as a group so that all of ours ideas are included and we agree on the content.
We had to consider all of these factors as these are all highly important when producing our opening sequence. We found it quite hard to decided on all of the features as we do have different opinions on what would create the best thriller. Therefore sometimes we would have disagreements on what should be included but in the end we tired to included everybody's ideas but as long as they was suited to the narrative.  In this meeting we also discussed the group name and company name. For our company name we wanted it to be something simple as it is not the main focus. We wanted our film title to give the audience a good idea of whats happening but it had to be short and something people could easily remember. Therefore we chose targeted. The conventions was easy to decided on as a group as blood, chase scenes, low key lighting etc. are all common within thrillers therefore we all knew what to include. Also the representation of the charters was easy to decided on as we all was agreed on the narrative

Our next group discussion was regarding MES, we discussed the setting, iconography, costume, hair and make up, facial expressions and body language, lighting and colour and positioning of characters we are going to use. All members in our group went away after a discussion and wrote up our ideas, then afterwards we colaberated them. Our main ideas were to have low key lighting, the antagonist wearing black scruffy clothing, the victim wearing white, an abandoned house and forest setting with photos and broken objects as iconography.
During this we also looked into character planning, Within the discussion we decided what our characters were going to wear and how they would act and look. We also decided who was going to play the character and what there background would be. 



Our next group discussion we had was on the sound we wanted to use. We got an A3 piece of paper and folded it to make four section whereby we listed each section with a different sound technique such as diegetic and contrapuntal. Then under the headings we wrote what sounds we wanted such as heavy breathing and footsteps and where we want to include them in our opening sequence. Then we went on to discuss how this would help the audience relate and how these types of sounds are conventional. An example was that when the antagonist catches his victim and drags her back to the house contrapuntal music will play over the top which is happy music as this juxtaposes the idea of what is going to happen to the victim and puts the audience on edge because the scene becomes very unnatural and creepy

This is our group planning scedual: