The Pitch

23/01/09

Today’s lesson consisted of pitching our final film idea to a panel (three teachers) . We would either receive the ‘green light’ or some constructive criticism toward our idea. Our very first initial idea was to do a chase between two characters similarly to a clip viewed in a previously lesson from the television drama series Torchwood. When discussing further into what we want to achieve in this task we decided to continue sharing ideas on what our final thriller narrative should be.

We then produced two ideas:
The first one is called ‘Downloaded’ and the idea is similar to an exemplar thriller created by one of the media technicians. With this I idea our group would be able to use a range of thriller techniques such as; computer ‘downloading percentage’ shots, the use of match-cutting to heighten tension and create a steady pace of the narrative and a smooth exchange of briefcases similar to a scene in the film Collateral.
The other new idea that our group created was ‘Walk to Death’ which was a dream sequence, based around the process of a girl committing suicide with a rope and a tree. Our ideas were to film the girl from behind without showing her face or any identifiable features using only point of view shots for the audience to empathise with her. We then wanted to end the sequence by having another character walk into the shot just as the girl is about to hang herself, making the final long shot into an over the shoulder shot.

We were in between the two ideas of ‘The Chase’ and ‘Walk to Death’, we asked our teachers for advice and the majority vote was toward the Walk to Death idea. Although we were told that it sounds too much like horror, we were given some guidance on how to make it less gory and more thrilling.

Once pitching both ideas ‘Walk to Death’ go the green light and we received support from our class peers on the idea as well. It reliving to know that we now have a final idea for out thriller film and we plan to do a digital story board with a camera next lesson so filming is not rushed and the speicifc shots we need are noted down.