Actors

At first we discussed what we would preferably like our actress to look like. We said that she should have dark hair and quite slim so she would have a lot of room within the coffin. We had a few actresses we considered:

Hannah Nanton-

Grace Quigley-

 

Daisy Doige Hill-

Set design

For the set for our thriller, we will build a coffin. We will make this out of wood and preferably have detachable sides so that we can film from various angles within the coffin. It will need to be approximately 7 ft long so there is room for the actress to move around.

Final build of the coffin:

We will be using shots of from inside from the top of the detachable box to get a point of view shot. 

By hvaing the detatchable long side, we will be able to film long shots of the body.

We may drill holes in the top of one of the long sides so we can funnel small amounts of dirt through to show that she is underground and so the character is aware of where she is, so it is clear she is not just stuck in a box.

Props

We are not needing very many props as we have limited space inside out set which is just a box able to fit a person in.
We will be needing an electric timer of some sort  which will provide a light source to the coffin but also the counting down on the timer will add tension and add urgency to the audience.

Location

We only need one loction and that is the graveyard at the end when it reveals where she is when the camera pans up to reveal that she is in a graveyard. We are planning to use the graveyard in Peaslake as it is quite a quiet village and that is good for our sequence.

Some issues that could arise on filming day is the weather. Preferably we need grey skies which hopefully it will be but we need to regularly check the forecasts for the filming day to see if we should rethink even filming this part or we should edit the storyboard. But we don't want any warm weather to affect the mood of the overall ending to the sequence.

We do not intend to spend much time, so possibly an hour, just to ensure we have a good shot to use and we have tried different angles in the actual location as we will need to test different angles and movements in this space.

We will be using one of the school mini busses to transport our equipment to the location which is five minutes away from our school campus. 

Later on in the planning of our production, we decided against using the location of the graveyard as we felt that more suspense would be created if it was all inside the coffin as there is a question left at the end as to where she is and if she has a chance of getting out. It leaves a slight cliff hanger which will make the audience want to carry on watching to see where she is and what happens to her. 

Costume

We need one costume for the main female character who will be in the coffin for the duration of the sequence. There are no extras.
We will need to order a white dress that looks quite old fashioned/ traditional wedding dress.
We decided as a group to use a wedding dress as it adds another question to the immediate impressions for the audience of what is going on and why is she there. It also gives something to the plot which is shown in the first sequence to look out for in the rest of the film. It is the motive to the person burying her and gives quite a sinister feel to the unknown character burying her.

Ideas and Feedback

We gave our general ideas of what we were planning to our other peers; at the funeral and then the camera pans down to the coffin and we see that the girl is inside alive, then it cuts to a man smiling at the funeral to say that he knows whats going on, but still a lot of the sequence is inside the coffin. The feedback we received was that there was too many aspects and that we should keep it more simple. We decided as a group to use this constructive criticism and narrow our idea down to more of a simplistic idea but still keeping high tension, which we thought would be better if it was all set in one space as the changing of surrounding could take away from the tension. Our idea which we will carry through to our production is a girl just trapped inside a coffin and the whole sequence will be filmed inside this coffin as we agreed that making it simplistic with a feature that is unknown to the character inside the coffin but that us as the audience are aware of from the beginning.

We also received feedback from our peers and the questioned what is going to happen during the two minutes which made us as a group think more deeply as to the storyboard and consider actual events that will fill the two minutes but also adding to the tension and pace of the sequence.

Story Board