Ashleigh Lovitt - Preliminary Film Idea

Genre - psychological thriller/horror

Plot:

After staring an anonymous blog, Taylor's main goal was to draw people in until he started dragging them down.

Taylor is a young aspiring writer. He is constantly sat behind a keyboard, alone in his room, writing folders upon folders worth of ideas and almost finished stories. One day, he decides he wants to move on from non-fiction and begin writing something more appealing, something that everyone would want to read. He tries his hardest to think of ideas and fails for many weeks until he stumbles upon a social media platform that allows anonymous pages. Not a second after finding this, the perfect idea becomes clear to him – an anonymous blog.

To begin with, the blog turns out to be very dull and relies on the ramblings about teachers and how much the school meals suck. A couple days later, Taylor is walking through the hallways at school and over hears a conversation between two girls. ‘Isabel cheated on Matthew last weekend at Alex’s party’. Immediately Taylor brings up his phone and begins typing his new post. Once he had done, he posted it under the school’s tag so everyone could see it and by the next day he had had over 250 views with so many comments and shares, it was then that Taylor realised that this is what they all wanted to read.

The blog carries on for almost a year. During this time three people had moved schools because of Taylor's exposing but this didn’t bother him, in his mind they are all getting what they deserved. Throughout that year the rumours got worse, the people got worse. Childhood friends began to throw each other under the bus. There was no trust anymore. After a long period, the blog becomes dead so Taylor decides to publish a secret that he thought he’d take to the grave. Head cheerleader, straight A student and old childhood friend, Natalie wasn’t prepared for what was about to come.

Natalie immediately realises who is behind the blog as she remembers that the only person who knows this secret it Taylor. Natalie finds Taylor and tries to convince him to delete the blog before they both get into trouble with the police. Taylor says no which forces Natalie to go to extreme measures to stop out of control Taylor.

At the end of the film, Taylor completely loses it and has an ‘episode’ regarding the blog. He murders Natalie on the school football field (at night with an axe) and is sent to a psychiatric ward, the blog is taken down and Taylor lives out the rest of his life in the ward.

The first three minutes:

The film begins with a zooming in shot of Taylor from behind hunched over a computer screen (in his bedroom). He is furiously typing a story. The camera zooms in on some of the words being typed and these are quite creepy, for example 'death'. The next shot is on a pile of rejection letters on the desk which cuts to a close up shot on Taylor's face. The opening sequence begins which is the title of the film being typed out on a keyboard.

After the title sequence, we see Taylor mumbling to himself (while still being sat at his desk) tapping pencils. He’s trying to think of new ways to write, this is shown in a shot of his notebook and his lack of ideas. Next, Taylor logs into some off his social media accounts and scrolls around for a while, then he comes cross the website which gives him his new idea. 

Joe Sheldon - Preliminary Film Idea

Genre: Crime Drama / Thriller

Overview:

Three 17 year old students return from a trip out and walk through a field to get home. They are Gemma, Thomas and Charlie; they’re all fairly high achieving students with a long lasting friendship. Upon walking through the field, they find a dead body between the trees and attempt to phone for the police. However, none of them have phone signal and it’s late at night, so they attempt to move the body somewhere lighter and out of the woods so that the authorities can see it when they come. Not thinking, all three of them touch the body to move it and as a result all three of them become suspects in a crime none of them committed. Under pressure from the police, his family and his own consciousness, Charlie takes the blame for the crime and is sentenced to life. Both Gemma and Tom go on to do well at university.

In prison, Charlie is often kept away from people because of his crime at such a young age. He begins to suffer psychological torment and his two ‘friends’ become the figures representative to him of how his life went wrong. He befriends CJ, Georgia and Frankie in prison, hatching a plan in his insanity to find and kill his two childhood friends. Despite his urges to hurt people and his declining mental state in prison, he keeps the pretence of normality to be let out on good behaviour, which charlie gets at age 30.

However, out of prison Charlie realises he loves Georgia and his thoughts begin to become clearer. Sometimes he begins to question his motives, and is in two minds about whether to kill either of his childhood friends. Charlie finds Gemma in her London home and initially thinks he’s going there to apologise. However, he find’s that she’s sleeping and takes a look around her apartment, finding she’s got great wealth and many pictures of her and Thomas from their university days. This angers him, and so he smothers her with her pillow and kills her. He rummages around in her kitchen draws to find Thomas’ address. Upon checking into a central London hotel, he cries over what he’s done and attempts to take his own life, although he wakes up the next morning having failed.

He finds Thomas, hitchhiking to Manchester to find him. Charlie turns up to the road and is surprised to find it’s a council estate. Thomas is surrounded by needles and rubbish in a dark and dingy home. Thomas is pleased to see Charlie when he turns up, which adds to his moral conflict. They have a long one to one chat in which Thomas explains how he couldn’t get a job because of his involvement with Charlie before he was convicted and turned to a life of petty crime and drugs. Charlie begins to hate himself and in a bad fit of guilt that night, he kills himself.

The film ends with a soliloquy from Thomas about how resentment is in the human condition but it doesn’t have to consume you, and how friendship is always meant to be something helpful. A bad friendship is no friendship at all.

Opening two minutes:

The friends are on a train, with an establishing shot from the window of the train. There is a brief conversation about the day and then the train comes to a halt, slowing at a platform. The opening credits are on black title cards placed between shots. It uses a bold red font to stand out and create an unnerving effect for the audience. I am hoping this will help set a tone of danger,as the opening scenes are meant to be somewhat distressing in nature.

They are walking across an open field with shopping bags, with brief laughter between them to contrast the darker tone. The field has dark tones, with sweeping shots from ground helping to set a slower pace before the crux of the opening two minutes.

They find the body and they react to it, with individual facial reaction shots. I plan for them to linger for a little longer than they should to build suspense. Gemma and Thomas are in action, talking about phoning authorities in panicked voices. The teenagers have a conversation collectively about what to do and attempt to call the police, only to find they have no service. They move to find service and bring the body with them so that the police can find them easier.

Group photo