AS Media

     To start with, our group didn't really have much of a clue of what to do! We knew we wanted to do a Thriller of some kind and to definitely stray as far away from comedy as humanly possibly. Although we had a strong understanding of the conventions of the genre and what would be good to include, we struggled to come up with realistic ideas that were possible to do around our area. Eventually we managed to narrow it down to just thinking about stories involving a room with very few characters and a hunt for something whilst a clock ticked down building to a climax that would leave the story on a cliffhanger.

     We had come up with a variety of different ideas but none of them were all that good in terms of stories. We came up with an idea of a man searching for some kind of drug that was maybe crucial to saving a huge group of people and that the clock ticking down would symbolise how close they were coming to dying but we realised that it would be very difficult to get a large group of people to act and that it would be incredibly difficult to get them all wearing the same thing each time we filme. It was also more of an idea that would probably be at the end of a film rather than the start because it's not usually the do or die situation right at the start of films bar maybe James Bond films. Another idea we had was to have the man searching for maybe a relic or artefact or some kind against the clock with the ticking down this time representing maybe another adventurer searching too. Again, the problem was that this is more of an idea for a scene that would pop up in the middle of a film rather than the start. We would also struggle to find an environment for the film good enough to give across a feeling of adventure because we felt as though a normal room wouldn't build up enough tension. 

     On September 23rd, our teacher had Jan (a successful local screen-writer) come in and talk to us about our ideas and to help us develop them further. This was particularly helpful for my group because, as mentioned before, we weren't too sure about what we could do. Luckily we jotted down some ideas on a piece of paper to take up to him and he gave us a better idea of what to do. On our paper, we had words/phrases like "searching against time" and "single room/single character". From this he gave us the idea of having one main character in a room searching around for something whilst a digital clock ticked down before the scene ends with a knock at the door. The idea was to also have a short phone conversation at some point that reveals our character being an agent of some kind and that the knock at the door would be the supposed "bad guys" finding our agent. This was the cliffhanger ending we were already thinking about but Jan helped us to get the basic ideas before that point. Below is an image of what Jordan drew when Jan was giving us ideas.