Developed Idea for Our Film Opening

To further explain how me and my partner plan on developing our film opening, we plan on utilizing many of the techniques seen in the films we drew our inspiration from when we initially thought of our idea. We already decided on the actress for the main character of the opening scene, which is going to be Valentina Suarez. Moreover, we deciding on using one of our houses as the setting in order to capture the concept that this “virus” can reach any individual of any social class. 

Moving on, to start the opening scene we would make use of a live news broadcast on a television in order to inform viewers of the global problem going on. The broadcast would also urges civilians to use burner phones in order to avoid the use of advanced cellular devices. Thus, with this information, the audience immediately becomes aware of the issue at hand. Moreover, we would then move on to show our main character viewing the broadcast, but like many others she is not convinced on the reality of this problem. Thus, viewers would be able to identify these feelings in the main character based of her facial expressions and on the conversations she would have on social media with her friends after viewing the broadcast. Furthermore, the conversation the main character has on social media contributes to the representation of a normal teenage girl we are trying to capture. Thus, this representation is based solely on the idea that teenagers are constantly on their phones; therefore, our plot works well with this concept because it targets individuals who always utilize their phones.

After the main character chats with her friends on social media, she receives a phone call and of course she answers the call without thinking about any of the consequences, which ends up resulting in her death.

Inspiration for Our Film Opening Idea

My partner, Sophia Jauregui, and I have put much thought into what type of horror film we want to base our film opening on. At the start of our researching journey, we looked at films that were mostly based on true stories of paranormal activities; however, we decided that we wanted to create a film opening mainly deriving aspects from films in the horror/science-fiction areas. Thus, we would be trying to capture an “end of the world” vibe through the horror genre. Of course, we would still use our previous research that we gathered; however, we would use research from the films such as Scream (1996) and Bird Box (2018) to develop our idea for our film opening.

To expand on the idea of our film opening, we plan on developing a plot in which the modern world has just recently experienced several occurrences of the same situation involving an individual answering a phone call from his/her contacts, which causes the person to kill themselves. However, since this issue is so new, many do not feel threatened by this dilemma. Thus, when our main character in our film opening, who is aware of this situation, receives a phone call from her best friend, she does not think anything of it and simply picks up the phone.

There were two films that served as inspiration for us in developing our film opening. Among these two was the 1996 classic film known as Scream, mainly due to the fact that the use of a telephone was present in serving as a signal for death. Moreover, in the opening of Scream the use of a phone was primarily used as a method of giving the audience a creepy vibe of someone watching the young teenage girl on the other line, and ultimately resulting in the death of the girl due to the stalker. Thus, we plan on using the phone as a way of communicating to the audience that the individual answering the phone is going to suffer deadly consequences.

Another film that served as inspiration to us was that of Bird Box (2018). The reason this film played a major role in helping us develop our idea is due to fact that the outcomes of the main problem is death; however, the causes that lead to death are different in our film opening. Furthermore, Bird Box (2018) is based on the idea that when you see the so-called creatures in the film, you end up committing suicide. Thus, we drew inspiration from this idea for our film opening because our plot consists of the idea that when an individual answers a phone call, they will inevitably kill themselves.

We also drew inspiration from the TV series Criminal Minds mainly because our film opening uses the same technique utilized by each episode of Criminal Minds. Essentially, this technique is that the first scene of the episode, basically sets up the main problem for the rest of the episode. Thus, we would be using our film opening as a way of giving an example of the horrifying global issue happening throughout the rest of the film.