News Broadcast Inspiration

As I stated last week, we have planned on including a news broadcast in our film opening. In Bird Box, the use of the news broadcast helped in setting the seriousness and the gravity of the event that was occurring. When the movie began, the problem had to be shown in some way, and it was done through the report. In this scene, the main character is shown watching the news with her sister. The reporter’s tone of voice is serious, desperate, and alarming as videos are shown of the mass suicides happening in Romania, Europe, and Siberia. As the woman’s facial expressions get affected by what she is watching, she changes the channel and another news reporter is also addressing the issue and how it is in Russia as well. Right away, she turns the volume off and says, “well, it’s in Russia so..”. The news broadcast helped the audience realize how the woman is ignorant to what she just watched. We were inspired by this news broadcast scene for our film opening. We will be introducing the worldwide conflict of our film by using a report like this one. Also we will be using the aspect of an ignorant character in our film opening, which will later lead to her death because of her personality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JcvQMM0Vzw

^^^This is the link to the news broadcast scene in Bird Box.


Furthermore, we plan on using the application iMovie to create this news broadcast. iMovie is an editing software application that will allow us to make a clip look like an actual news report. Using different effects, titles, and subtitle headlines, we will be experimenting on different ways that we can make it look like a news headline. My partner and I will be the anchors reporting the news. As I said above, in Bird Box, the reporters were very serious and had desperate tones of voice which we will be using to make it seem more severe and realistic. We will be adding videos of war-like chaotic scenes to make it look more extreme, since it will also be a mass-suicide type of film. Lastly, we will be using my computer to use iMovie for the news broadcast, not my partner’s. In the past with other projects for this class, we have tried using hers, but we have come across many issues with downloading the final project into her Files. Moreover, we will be playing it safe and using mine from the start so we don’t have to do it twice.

Developing our idea

Our plot is starting to come together. We have figured out the overall idea of our film opening and the main scenes, but the details are still being figured out. Our opening will begin with our lead actress, the teen Valentina Suarez, sitting on the couch while watching a news broadcast which will be announcing the worldwide problem of the phone calls that are making people kill themselves. Valentina will listen to this announcement and will show with her facial expressions that she doesn’t believe it. She grabs her phone and begins to text her friends about this “unbelievable” and “unreal” news. This uses the teen representation, since they always have to use social media and texting to report to their friends what is going on. Very shortly after that, she receives a call from one of her best friends, and that is when the monster immediately gets inside of her. This plot is crazy because it would be interesting to see people live their everyday lives without their phones.

Ideas for Film Opening and Inspiration

We have began planning out our ideas for our film opening. Throughout the brainstorm process, my partner and I used three horror movie films/shows as inspiration. The first movie is “Scream” (1996 film). In the film opening, there was a teenage girl that would answer the phone and an unknown caller, the killer, would threaten her life. We will be using a teenage girl as the female lead of the movie. We have asked many of our friends and we have determined that it will be Valentina Suarez. She is an older looking teen and she is quite dramatic which will make her perfect for the role of our lead actress. We will also be using the phone aspect in our film opening, like in Scream, we will feature the phone as a way for the killer to reach the victim. When a person in our movie answers the phone, the monster gets inside of them and makes them want to kill themselves, and they will continue to call other people from their contacts.

The second movie that we got inspiration from was “Bird Box”, this is a film that has to do with a creature that gets inside of you and makes you want to kill yourself if you look at it. We will be applying this technique in our movie, except through the phone, not through sight. In our opening, the teenage girl will see her phone ringing, and the name of one of her friends will appear as the incoming caller. She will answer the phone thinking that she’s safe, and the monster will get inside of her. Lastly, we got an idea from the show “Criminal minds”. Every episode is a new mystery to solve for the FBI team. In the beginning of every episode, the crime that is being committed is shown to provide some background details for the viewer, it is only after that the episode starts unravel. We will be making our film opening in this way, one case of the whole movie, which is why the movie will begin with a tragedy.

“Scream.” IMDb, IMDb.com, 20 Dec. 1996, www.imdb.com/title/tt0117571/.

“Bird Box.” IMDb, IMDb.com, 21 Nov. 2018, www.imdb.com/title/tt2737304/.