PLANNING: INITIAL IDEAS

We would like to work with the codes of enigma and suspense. Our openings begins with a woman in a hospital who has just received news that she cannot have children. This causes her to become mentally unstable. You see her watching programmes on mothers and reading books on children such as child names books. This creates enigma as we have just found out she cannot have children. We then see the reason for her actions is her obsession with dolls and young children due to trauma that she has seen at war due to her being a war photographer. We then see her reveal a doll from an old suitcase. She treats the doll like a child which is not the behavior of a mentally stable person. We then end the sequence with the woman in a park watching the other children. She then snatches one of the young children that resemble the doll and we see her walking off with this child.

We have chosen to do this as it is not a typical film that would be made by people that are given the same task as me: youngsters running through the woods with knives, however it is a film opening that would create suspense and enigma as we do not know what this woman is going to do now that she has kidnapped this child. The reason that we came up with the idea of the doll is because it is something that has been used before for example films such as Chucky (1988, Tom Holland) however not in this way. We think that creating this opening sequence will bring new ideas into the film industry.

I have written a formal treatment about our ideas: 

• Our film will start in a doctors office
• There will be a woman who is clearly nervous: shaking her foot
• A doctor comes out whilst there is a voice over of him
• She then seems angry and gets up
• Then she leaves the office 
• She leaves and goes home
• She rummages through old images
• They are of war photography
• She then rips up an image of a child
• She throws the pieces on the floor
• Then gets down on her knees and holds the images in agony 
• She watches a child with a toy
• Then goes to an old suitcase
• A doll is revealed
• There is a montage of images of her and the doll
• She treats the doll in a human way 
• She is in the park watching the previously seen child play
• The child is on the swing
• Her mother walks off 
• The protagonist begins to push the child due to her mothers absence
• The mother and child go home as the mother is startled
• There are clear camera movements indicating the woman is following the mother and daughter home
• The woman bribes the child when she is alone
• She kidnaps the child
• The end shot is of the child's toy which is now not with the child indicating danger