Group Narrative - Miss Georgiou

A narrative is essentially a story line to a film, in a thriller this is used to create suspense, shock and tension which engages the audience. Many thriller films tend to use an Enigma in their narrative to confuse the audience and so they can have something at the end, which solves the enigma and surprises the audience. Within my group we read through one another’s work and looked at the advantages and the disadvantages of each idea. This then allowed us to get a well thought about narrative that create suspense, shock, surprise and will engage the audience.

The first idea I looked at was an idea about a man who comes home from work and finds that there is no one home in his house; he then receives a phone call from an unknown number. During the phone call cheerful music is being played to lead the audience into a full sense of security. The character then runs up the stairs to find his wife dead hanging from the attic. He then turns around and finds the murder standing behind him with a knife in his hand. This is a good idea but I believe it doesn't quite bring shock, surprise or suspense throughout although does show elements of these in some parts. Although we have decided to use a few elements from this in out main idea but some ideas do not reach the criteria of a good thriller. For example the idea of the man answering an unknown phone call is a good idea as it creates suspense, as we do not know who is on the other end of the call. On the other hand the idea of when the man turns round to find the killer doesn't create the shock in which it should when revealing the villain.

Another idea contains inspiration from the film 'Nightmare on Elm Street' and 'Paranormal Activity'. The narrative is about a young boy has this nightmares but actually this nightmares are real, yet he isn't aware of this, and he ends up getting abused in a sort of way by this mysterious person in an anonymous mask, that for example, when his breath would be cold against the hot air, something bad would happen, in this occasion this masked character would become present and drag the young boy off his bed whilst he is asleep, but the boy wakes up and finds himself on the floor and very confused so it creates a lot of sense of enigma, and would play on the audiences mind. My group were able to pick out the points that would come at an advantage for our group narrative for example in sixth sense when the main character is about to be part of something he didn't want to, he would breathe cold air that would go against the heat and create a puff of condensation appears, and my group would like to use this idea and have put it forward for when we do our opening clip.

We analysed one another’s work and came up with a final idea. This idea consists of many ideas from the first piece i looked at and also the second as well as mine. Our final idea is about a man who comes home from work and goes upstairs to find his wife isn't there, he then receives a phone call from the killer who is hiding in the wardrobe the electricity goes out and the house becomes dark, the victims breathe goes cold as he realises someone is there to kill him. He then tries to escape and runs towards his car but forgets his keys, he then runs back to the house to find the electricity back on. He then tries to escape but see's a hand covered in blood on the window. I believe this idea does well in creating surprise, shock and suspense as we do not know whom the killer is and we get shocked when we see the hand on the window. I also believe the enigma in out piece, the hidden identity, does well in creating suspense and leads well into revealing who the killer is and where he was hiding.