At today’s meeting we tried to develop the sequence into something that we all liked. The first setback was that Pablo got covid and we had to call him on Teams. We all wanted different things Pablo wanted to make a thriller, Bert wanted to make a action sequence and I wanted to make a comedy sequence. So I came up with a structure for a sequence with elements that we all liked. Bert and I then developed this structurer and wrote a short discerption of what we were imagining:
The sequence opens on a mysterious man who has just killed a Family. We then cut to a confession booth where a stereotypical village idiot confesses to hideous sins. In the next minute the scene cuts between the mysterious murderer and the weird villagers confessing to sins. The sequence climaxes when the murder walks past the villagers into the church and enters the confession booth saying, ‘forgive me father for I have sinned’.
With this sequence we are going for a Hot Fuzz vibe. Hot Fuzz is an action comedy written and directed by Edgar Wright. The film combines the setting of a action film with a small British village and is in my and critics opinion incredibly funny.
We pitched our idea to Pablo who seemed to like it, so Bert started developing the opening where the mysterious man murders a Family while I started thinking of the villager scenes. Bert came up with a rough plan for the first 30 seconds of the sequence:
Low camera angle of a hallway. The door is being knocked violently. The mother walks to the door and opens it. Few seconds of silence then you hear a knife stab into her and you see the low angle view of her falling to the ground. The man walks into the room, still only seeing his feet. There is a small boy in the corner of the room sobbing. There’s a low angle shot looking up at the hooded figure looking down. And a high angle shot looking down of at the boy. Then you see the shadow of the man bringing down his knife. He picks up his bag at a low angle shot of just lower body and walks out.
This new idea drastically increases our cast. Due to the size of our production, we must try and minimalize the cast again. The style of Film we are going for if done correctly can be really entertaining but its also hard to pull of. We therefore all have to be on the same page and really work together as a team.
Today we decided on one idea. ‘The local Priest’ won the vote. We spend the rest of the lesson trying to develope the original idea into something we could all get excited about.
Today we tried to diced on one idea. ‘The local priest’ (Pablo’s idea,) is a narrative driven thriller sequence while ‘fun family function’ (my idea) is presenting a moment in time which could be the start to a dramedy. As both ideas are doable it is up to what we like the best. After a long discussion we decided to sleep on it and to vote on which idea we are going to do tomorrow.
At today’s meeting we discussed another idea, additionally to the family function idea that we had settled on previously. The additional idea we discussed, ‘The local priest’ was mentioned before on this blog, in the blog post ‘Action lists’. We then got feedback on both of our ideas from a previous Hurtwood student who is now a professional camera Operator and camera assistant. He listened to both of our ideas and thought that both of them would be doable. We now have to decide on which idea we want to peruse.
At todays meeting we started doing our first storyboards. While drawing we discovered that all of us had different visions on how the sequence should look and we attempted to discuss these ideas and find common ground. Amongst other things we talked about maybe adding more actors to the scene, the shape of the table but also if we should start with a longer opening that starts in a corridor showing different pictures of the family thereby offering more expossion.
