Character List

Female Character Guideline:

Young woman that has a strong personality,
dark hair, inherits a leader personality.










Robber 1:

Around a 35-43 year old man with a Liverpool accent, very short hair (possibly bald) and has a harsh personality and cares for his fellow correspondents.










Robber 2:

A guy that is in his mid thirties, looks a bit different to all the other robbers. We are looking for him to have a quiet personality that helps out purely because he needs the cash from the mission.







Robber 3:

The last robber is an actual doctor in real life that has specialist skills and helps out with the technology and downloading part of the mission. He is in his mid forties and is non-white.

Casting Kennith

Cast List

	Name: Zell Oxenham Age: 17/18 Character: Main robber Contact Number: 07936697832
	Name: Adam Grant Age: 39 Character: Robber 2 Contact Number: 07832455121
	Name: Mike Age: 30 Character: Robber 3 Contact Number: 07770823936

Name: Dave Fonseka Age: 50 Character: Wounded robber Contact Number: 07880439123

Name: James Hartman Age: 43 Character: Assasin Contact Number: 07950482712

Emails confirming our cast list

Below are the current confirmations that we have got from our cast. At the moment we are developing our shooting schedule so that it could fit with the casts' daily schedules. At this point we have got a couple of cast members who didn't reply, although thankfully we were able to speak in person and they told me that they won't be able to star in our thriller due to their tight schedules. We are trying to find replacements for them at the moment. 

Narrative Action

The vans doors swing open. four figures dressed up in masks move towards the van. One being carried by two of the figures.

They scramble into the van. Pulling the doors closed. A bleeding indian appearing character is laying on the floor of the van. He begins instructing them on how to treat a wound.

The asian character begins shouting in his native tongue, as the bleeding indian continues to describe what he needs for his wound.

One of the other characters begin to help the bleeding indian by getting the recovery kit and sifting through all the different objects. As the female character starts raging at the character with the recovery kit.

The female character and the character with the recovery kit continue to argue about how each other had mucked up. Then they both turn to the asian character who is still shouting in his native tongue and they both shout at him to shut up.

The turn to each other in the calm silence and then the van slams to a stop. You can hear foot steps outside.

Then the van doors are yanked open and in the bright light a blurry figure begins walking towards the van.

The blurry figure has two men made of bulk by his side in balaclavas. An older man walks towards the van.

He motions to a briefcase latched onto the asian characters hands. The asian character submissively passes it over, when the character with the recovery kit and the female character both drop what they are doing and grab onto the briefcase.

There is a back and forth with the briefcase. Till the old man snatches it out of there hands.

As the old man walks away the character who had the recovery kit asks ‘Could we get our money?’. The doors shut.

Titles

Made by Ashen Page

Agreed costumes

Costume Research

For the robbers we decided on boiler costumes as in most movies they portray 'thriller' like feelings and often in many thrillers the robbers wear these. We decided to have the costume in dark tones as most people would associate robbers with dark colours. These suits are very common and therefore it would be difficult to identify the person underneath it. It is very important that all of the robbers look pretty much identical, but we thought that each one should have something small that differs from the rest. The boiler suit is very plain and it fits with an amateur robbery. Some of our might have difficulties getting into the costume, therefore, we thought that if it didn't fit in the from part then they could just wear a jumper and tie top of of the boiler suit to their waste. Also, plain white shirts underneath the boiler suite in order to make it all look very sleek. 

In order to disguise the robbers I found a couple of different types of masks that could potentially cover their identity and make the sequence stand out a bit more. There are three options. Option one is of different types of animals, option two is plain theatrical masks and the third option is a storm trooper mask from Star Wars. Below are some of examples of these. It is important that we stick to the same mask for everyone, meaning that if we had 5 pig masks, each of the robbers would wear the same one. 

They are going to wear plain black trainers.

Location and Props research

PROPS:
Masks with costumes: the actors playing the main characters are robbers and so to make them seem more threatening, we though it would be a good idea to have masks with matching costumes. This would also establish that they are a part of the same organisation. This was inspired by films such as The Purge 2 and The Town.




Sacks/Cases: We will need some sort of sack or briefcase dependingon the item that the robbers will be stealing.










Fake money or diamonds: Depending on what is being stolen, some sort of object would need to be in the bag to give the realism of the weight of the items in the sacks.

Van: We are going to use a van for the robbers to get away in. We will use the schools bus.

Weapons: Similar to The Purge we will need different types of weapons. As these robbers aren't very professional, they would be using weapons like baseball bats and bb guns.










LOCATION: 

Car Park: After the robbers have stolen the goods, the van will pick them up from a car park

Van: Most of the opening title sequence will be in the van. There will be some arguments as the robbery didn't go completely to plan seeing as one of the members has been injured.











Woods: When we find out that the driver has taken them to a different destination than originally planned, we see that they have been stitched up. For this we will use the woods thats all around our college as it gives the impression that they are in the middle of 
nowhere.



Research done by Haydon Downing 

Final Idea!

After discussing our idea, we found that there was quite a lot happening at once and this seemed like a major issue. Adam reinforced it into our heads that opening title sequences do not have to have a lot of action, they could just consist of one side of the story line. It seemed that with the amount of time that we have to film it isn't enough for the current idea that we have. So to make our lives more simple, we decided to just make the robbery the main focus of our opening sequence. It starts off with bank robbers stumbling over and getting into the van from their 'mission'.They drag the guy who has been shot to the van and he starts to give directions to a guy who tries to help him. This is because the guy who got shot is a doctor in real life and all the others have no clue what to do. At the back of the van there is a lot of chaos at this point, they think that the driver is driving them back to their apartment but in actual fact the driver wasn't who they thought he was. So they drive them to an abandoned road that is in the middle of nowhere. There is a car standing there and a man and his guards step out and open the van doors. They take the case and shut the doors on them, this is when the title of the thriller pops up.

Idea 2

We developed Ashen's idea by getting rid of the poker game because we spoke to Matt and Luke and they suggested that we think of something instead of the poker game, due to the difficulty of shooting a cards game. Another reason why we changed this idea was because it would take a long time to get the continuity levels equal. So, we came to conclusion that we should incorporate an old idea into Ashen's new one. There would still be a robbery happening but at the same time we get cuts to a guy in his mid forties getting up and having his morning routine, the audience assume that he is rich because this is all happening in a huge mansion. We used a previous CEO idea that we decided not to take through, in this instance it helped us by giving us a different action to focus on whilst the robbery is taking place. Another benefit from this is that there is a clear contrast between the two actions happening at the same time. The CEO is having a very calm and chilled morning with pleasant music playing in the background whilst he is getting ready. Whereas, the robbers are climbing into the fan from their mission, there is a lot of shouting and panicked voices in the van. One ends up being shot in the shoulder and the woman (main robber) tries to make sure that everything is going to plan and under control.

Issues with our idea

Skype + New idea

Over the holidays we arranged to speak on the 30th of December and share our ideas. We had some technical difficulties with Hayden's Skype, so for a while it was Ashen, Alen and me. Ashen introduced his new idea to us and all of us found some way of developing it in order to make it more exciting.

Ashen's idea: A cross cut switch between a robbery and an intense poker game. Like in most movies there would be a spotlight on the table and the people sitting around it would just have slightly dimmed lighting surrounding them. The only thing that the audience would focus on is the hand dealing the cards out. We are unable to see the background and the place that all of this is happening in, as it is all blacked out. This could potentially suggests that the game could have an illegal twist to it. There would be sudden cuts to these amateur robbers throwing bags of cash into a small white minivan. The robbers are all in black disguise. There would constantly be cuts from the poker game to the white van as the robbers get in and start to argue about something that had gone wrong. 

Starting from scratch

During our last couple lessons of 2015 we were trying to figure out what to do with our idea. There was a lot of arguing and decision making, we even spoke to Adam our media teacher and he suggested that we start brainstorming of a completely different idea during our winter holidays. We felt pressured because all of knew that we didn't have a long time till we come back and start shooting. This proposition was probably the best thing that has happened to our group because the idea that we had kept on going around in circles and we weren't getting anywhere. My group and I have arranged a sky session after the first week of the holidays in order to share our ideas and start doing some research into our assigned roles. 

Difficulties with the 'Prozac' idea

We have come across a few difficulties with the idea. We tried to switch around and see if any of the idea's that Matt gave us would work with the initial idea. As we started developing it, we found that the back to forward idea was too complicated and didn't quite work with the story plot. Even though, pulling off the effects would look cool, we spoke and decided that it just wouldn't work as there were a lot of complications with special effects.

During class we spent some time analyzing our current idea, it seemed to us that the storyline didn't work and there was not enough action happening for us. Ashen said that he wanted the opening sequence to uncover more of the drug side effects, so that the audience could see how it takes over. Alen and I thought that the mirror breaking wouldn't work, due to the danger and the actual effect of it. The mirror not only costs a lot of money, but we thought that it might not be worth it because the glass breaking in Hollywood movies are done with budget and a lot of time, whereas, we only have one day to film and we can't rely for the mirror to be the only dramatic action in our opening.

Mirror research

Before we had introduced this idea we did some research on a mirror breaking into pieces, as we thought that this would be the most difficult thing to film. Below is the link to the mirror that we are thinking of buying as it can break easily. The problem will all of these different breakable mirrors online, is that all of them still have the risk of injury.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Acrylic-Mirrored-ACRYLIC-PERSPEX-PLEXIGLAS/dp/B005QUKRJI

Here are the steps that we found for breaking this mirror:

1. Put on gloves and safety glasses

2. Place a tarp under the mirror

3. Score the mirror into sections with a glass cutter

4. Place strips of duct tape underneath the score lines

5. Cover the mirror's entire surface with a carpet protector film (available at home improvement stores)

6. Tap the mirror lightly with a small hammer along the duct-tape covered score lines until the glass breaks.

7. Remove the carpet protector film and duct tape carefully if you're reusing the mirror pieces.

16.12.15

Currently, my group and I are stuck on a particular concept of the idea that we picked. Therefore, we all went away and thought about how we can incorporate this idea of drugs going around schools that nobody everybody is unaware about. We all came back and brainstormed, our whole group came up with this idea:

There is a teenage boy that looks like he hasn't slept in days, he lives in a tiny messy room and is getting ready to go to school. It starts off by him turning the room upside down in order to find his backpack and then he puts a shirt on and opens these two drawers. Inside the drawers we see loads of pills (Prozac). This is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) antidepressant. Prozac affects chemicals in the brain that may be unbalanced in people with depression, panic, anxiety, or obsessive-compulsive symptoms. He takes searches through the drawer to find a full jar, he finds it and takes 5 pills whilst putting the container into his back pack. The noise that we hear at this point is all just background noise and at some points some music tunes from downstairs. The camera at this point is POV and we get a close insight into his pupils and another scene of a x-ray of him swallowing the pills and how it's going through his body. He stumbles over to the mirror and takes a glance at himself, he's getting blurry vision and suddenly punches the mirror and we have a slow motion of it shattering. At this point we would have gotten the titles and we were even thinking about have it reverse back to the start where he was walking through the door to get downstairs.