Initially we thought of filming a mother in a hospital, who has just given birth. She was to wake up from resting, in a hospital bed and looks to her side to see her child. However, the baby wasn’t there. When she asks the nurses they have to recognition of a child ever existing.
But we slowly realised that this would be very hard to film. The setting would be very difficult to manage and the mise en scene would be very hard to organise and collect, seeing as we would have to gather all the hospital equipment together.
Also, from the results of our questionnaire, we see that this type of genre (thriller/crime/mystery) attracts a male audience and we felt that having a woman as the main character in this genre of film would not appeal to a male audience as they would not be able to relate themselves to the mother.
However, we still liked the idea of something psychological or mysterious, so we kept this genre in mind for our film. The next idea we had was a car crash. We wanted to try and use interesting shots and do something different, so we thought that this was a good idea.
We then introduced a father and son into the scene. This solved our problem of not attracting a male audience, as the main character is a father figure, so men could relate to this. Also, it still appeals to a female audience because the actions of the father are quite nurturing; as he is trying to take care of his son. We then went back to the initial idea and thought about how we could include a sense of mystery into this opening.
Finally we created the idea of the father waking up from the crash and the son not being there, walking away from him, or being taken from him. We then concluded on the idea of the son being taken away from the father and into the woods. This really adds a sense of mystery to the film opening and the kidnapping of the son will add a frightening atmosphere as well, which would appeal to our target audience.
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But, some elements of the film were changed between initial pre-production and final pre-production. Firstly, we changed the characters in the film. Instead of a son and father being inside the car, we decided to involve more of a family, so that the film could be more relatable. Also, this gives us a chance to represent a wider range of social groups so that the film will appeal to all of the people in our target audience. Another smaller reason for doing this was that finding an actress to play the mother character proved to be a lot easier than maintaining commitment from the actor of the father, therefore it gave us more flexibilty when filming as the actress was available more often.
The second thing that we removed from the film idea is the flashbacks. We felt that as a film opening the flashbacks weren’t entirely neccessary and therefore we decided not to shoot them so that we could capture more visually interesting shots which would capture the audience’s attention more effectively. This also meant that there was no dialogue in the film, I think this will this prove to be effective in screening the film as the audience will become more captured in the action and the visual images rather than a script, which will help to create a more interesting film.
Lastly, we talked in detail about the ambiguity of the antagonists and the kidnapping, and we felt that it would be more interesting to only show the audience a slight insight to the kidnapping, rather than including shots of the kidnappers taking the boy out of the car and into the woods. We felt this would attract the audience more, as the narrative would become more unclear so the audience would want to continue watching as the story is revealed. Also, this meant that we could hide the antagonists’ identity so the film would become a hidden mystery which would again attract the audience to a greater degree.
