Film opening planning

Film opening planning

First Idea

A small section in image above includes some of the plot summary
What happens is that the whole clip starts off very positive, the audience is shown elements that depict a very happy mood. The first shot, which is not shown in the story board, will be just be black with the words "it has been a year."

The next shots will be just what appears the protagonist preparing and getting ready like every morning (eg shower, shave etc. not all preparations are shown in the storyboard). He then puts on suit and grabs a bouquet of flowers.
I haven't included this story board, but we could add a picture of him and a girl - looking like a normal couple.
The purpose of these shots are to convince the audience that the 'one year' is a one year anniversary, or a year of being a couple.

The twist happens in the second page of the storyboards. Instead of walking up to a house, as the audience would expect, he goes to an empty field, lays flowers down, and says " Its been a year since I killed you".


We decided that this idea would become a flashback, and we joined it with another idea that Praew had.

Second Idea

Preaw came up with a rough idea revolving around crime, murder and detective/mystery. However we did not manage to confirm a solid plan or plot.

Third Idea

This is the final idea that we decided on. We decided to go with a sci-fi thriller theme opening. The initial inspiration with this came from Heavy Rain/Quantic Dreaming's tech demo clip named Kara.

Other inspirations include Deus Ex - Human Revolution cinematic trailer, Ex Machina and Cyberpunk 2077 trailer.

We wanted to explore the theme of identity.

The first shot will revolve around the main protagonist's head being shown, revealing that they're part human part machine. The camera will then focus on the face, the construction of the body being suggested by the soundscape. The music will start as the protagonist opens their eyes.

Throughout the construction of the body, the shot will jump to a running and chasing scene. The location will be in a city. The shots will primarily focus on closeups and reflections.

Above is the sketch I made in photoshop that would help us visualize what we were after. We planned to take real images and placed them to form something we already envisioned, rather than base our vision on something that already exists.
The sketch is actually based off a combination of 3 images we came up with. One from a scene in the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, another from a concept art of a dystopian city, and another from a street in Japan. I rearranged all the images, so in terms of the rules of perspective, they look cohesive and make sense.

The sketches below show a thumbnail of the girl from the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, to show the relation to the above sketch.

We saw a possibility in actually creating the set in photoshop, rather than film it all live, and use the '2.5D effect', or parallax effect, and shoot pictures of the actors in controlled lighting separately. This way, we would be able to really mold what we want.

Below is a short time lapse of some of the work we did



Final version of the first piece

This is the final piece. At this point of filming, we might just end up using this for the title. Due to how some of the painting is unrealistic, we might add motion blur.
Another thing which we looked at was giving the effect of a 3D plane using 2D images. This means that we would be able to turn this image and give it animated depth.