Our Design

This is our design because we called our production "MILANO" Productions. Well work on it with Photoshop to make it more effective.

My Version

In my opinion our new version is very effective because it makes sense and fulfills all the aspects of a thriller. It is interesting because people being schizophrenic is a theme that is accurate and very scary because we don’t really know what it is. Another thing is the way our narrator behaves is very scary because his mind is ill and therefore we don’t know what he is going to do next. Another thing that makes this production good is that his wife doesn’t know that he has another life, but we do and therefore the audience is scared. It holds together because the narrative TOM has a reason for doing the things he does because his brothers face is deformed and therefore he can’t stand to see other people’s faces. I would sent this to Hollywood to Warner Bros. because they are a huge film company which produces very expensive productions and I think that this movie can be brilliant if Hollywood would spent money for it because you could have lots of “police work” in it as well and the use of CGI for deformed faces and even explosions of the cellar which would make this simple production a very high class thriller/horror production in the style of “Seven”. Hollywood is able to do those things and therefore I wouldn’t sent it to a British film company because this horror production should have elements of a thriller and therefore be financed and given the green light by Hollywood to make it a huge production.

What is a Film Treatment?

A Film Treatment is necessary because it allows the screenwriter to communicate their screenplay idea in a brief but compelling way and it is a powerful creative tool. Writing a Treatment is a fast way to test out an idea before it is transformed into a script and it allows a screenwriter some distance between the idea and the script. Further it can help the screenwriter to work out problems and determine if the story holds up. Also the story can then be developed according to what the people want to see.
The length of a treatment is appropriate to the final product. It is necessary to communicate the story of the narrative and the treatment should tell the whole story and should focus on the highlights. It is a document that is a scene by scene breakdown of the actual script.
A Treatment should read like a short story and should be written in the present tense. It should present the entire story with its end and maybe even use key scenes and some dialogue from the screenplay that it’s based on. It should include a working title, name and contact information of the writer, introduction to the key characters and answer the questions “who, what, when, why, where”.
Another important aspect is that it should break up the story into three parts which are the foundation stores for the building of the story.
Act 1  Situation, characters, conflict is introduced.
Act 2  Conflict begins and expands until it reaches a crisis
Act 3  Resolution; conflict rises to one more crisis and then it is resolved

Three Act Treatment

ACT ONE1. Man steps out of his car in front of a scary looking building. He is isolated and in the dark. He walks into his ‘workshop’ where all of his tools are laid out neatly on a table. He starts ripping bed linen up, stabs knifes through to make eye holes and stitching them back together again to make masks.2. The man picks up the mask, and walks down a corridor towards a trap door. He opens the trap door and walks down the spiral staircase. He lights a match which lights the candle. Then we see a girl tied up against a wall and she is whimpering. She wets herself and then the camera tilts up to see the girls face. Suddenly the man pulls the mask over the girls face and the title appears.3. The man puts the child into a cage with lots of other children who are all wearing masks. Suddenly one child pulls off his mask and the man gets very aggressive. He takes out his knife and pulls the mask back over the head of the child. Full of anger, he runs out to his workshop where there are family pictures on the wall. In one, he and his brother are standing between his parents. However his brother’s face is deformed. Next to this photo there are newspaper articles about a car crash.4. The man looks to the left and we see his brother sitting in a corner, unable to move with a mask in front of his face. However we can see his face is deformed because there are holes and rips in the mask. Suddenly we see lights flash down the corridor and the man grabs his brother and runs away.ACT TWO5. A female police officer called Annie comes to rescue the children in the cage and sees the pictures on the wall, but the pictures of the man are gone. The police officer is angry and says ‘There’s nothing I can do right now, we can’t find him’. She steps into her car and drives home for dinner with her husband. However when he greets her, we see that in fact it is the man who captures the children.6. At that moment we realise that the man is a schizophrenic. The man says very nervously, ‘Did you find anything new?’ while having dinner. His wife answers, ‘No not yet, but we found a picture of a family’. The man gets very scared and tells his wife that he isn’t feeling very well. He gets up runs outside and jumps into the car and drives away.7. On his drive, he gets flashbacks of himself with his brother. He is disgusted at the sight of his brother’s disfigurement, so he takes the bed sheets covers his face to hide it. Suddenly his phone rings and his wife is screaming ‘Look, look... I know it all of it – your brother is here... HELP!!’ACT THREE8. The man is driving the car and suddenly stops, he doesn’t know what to do, but then he spins the car around and goes back to the house to rescue his wife.9. As he enters back into his house, he sees his wife tied up on a chair unable to move and his brother is standing in front of her, no longer wearing a mask. His brother smiles at him and says ‘Hello Brother’. The man is still close with his brother, so he thinks of ways to save his wife. However, as he looks into the face of his brother, he changes mind and looks back to his wife with an evil facial expression. He looks at the knife in his brother’s hand and says ‘Give it to me, let’s do it together’.10. Annie screams and tries to get away as her husband says, ‘Let me do it’. The man hands the knife to his brother and he walks towards Annie. However he sets her free and they both walk towards the main male character (referred to throughout as ‘the man’). His wife says, ‘I’ve always known who you were Tom’. She walks towards him and cuts his face open, leaving it bleeding. She rips up bed sheets which were neatly folded after coming out the tumble dryer just hours before, and places it over his face.The man’s brother says ‘Good job darling’, kisses her, then stabs her in the heart and leaves the house.

Further Thriller Production

Today we were criticized for our thriller idea and had to change it because it didn’t really made sense. Therefore we needed to change every production we have started to make a better one. We wanted to have a man getting out of his car in front of a house, looking round, hearing creepy noises and seeing lights in front of a house. Then he should go back to his car and have flashbacks of potato sack masks that are being stitched and children that are wearing them. Then he sits back in his car and drives away until suddenly the flashlights of the car hit a child with a potato sack mask in the middle of the street. The man blinks and the child is gone. Then the camera zooms into the car and the child is in the back seat. We were criticized a lot because the teachers felt that the idea was already taken too often (Friday 13th, the orphanage, Strangers) and potato sacks wouldn’t really fit into our environment. The biggest criticism we got was the fact that the story didn’t make a lot of sense, therefore we changed it to give it a real story.
In our short sequence you’ll see this:
Tom gets out of his car and walks towards the house. Then we do a montage shoot when he is sitting in the cellar ripping bed linen and cutting eyes and stitching them back together etc. During this sequence the titles will be flashed in. Then he suddenly hears a child laughter, takes his lamb and searches. The lamb lights hit the feet of a child and then the light goes up and we get a close up of a child screaming under such a mask. Cold breath comes out of his mouth and builds the title of the movie.
The idea of the total movie will be shown in the next post.

Start Process of our Thriller Production

Today we strated the process of storyboarding and talking about props and locations. As our Coursework we need to produce the beginning sequence of a Thriller/Horror Production which should last about 2 and a half minutes. I am in a group with Storm, Tom and Amy and we started the process of creating a storyboard by writing down the order of actions that are going to happen to then convert them into a storyboard. Amy is the Producer, Storm is the Director as well as me and Tom is the editor. We created a storyboard to make sure that when we are on the set we know excactly what and how we are going to shoot it and don't have to make it up. It provides instructions to the sound and camera crew and helps the director to organise the scene. A storyboard is also very hgelpful because if you are for example having a conversation in the sequence you don't take the camera, do the first sentense and then everyt b ody is turning round behind the other person so with the help of the storyboard you can form shots together and shot shots that are the same at the same time.
This is out list of actions so far :
Shots
1. The gate is closed and we see a car arriving and stopping in front of the gate
2. Tom goes out to open the gate and then drives through it (when the leaves blow up they from “Milano Production Presents”)
3. shot out of one of the windows in the house seeing the car arriving (we see the breath on the window and then a “A Storm Cunningham Film” is written in there”
4. pow shot of Tom looking at the house
5. shot from in front of the house seeing Tom getting out of the car and starting to walk
6. track shot of him going to the house
7. CU of his face looking around anxiously (next to him a door sign saying “featuring Tom and Alabama)
8. ECU of him looking through the window
9. mid shot of h8im hearing the noises
10. shot of the lights flashing behind the door
11. Tom walks back the mid shot and down the front door stairs until he ends in a long shot
12. camera sits in the back of the car and sees Tom arrive and enter the car
13. camera zooms into his eyes and the flashbacks begin
14. fast cut from long shot to ECU of the masks on the children (cold breath comes out and builds ( Produced by Amy Milan)
15. cut to Tom
16. shot of Tom stiching the mask (sticking stuff builds “Directed by Storm Webster and Stephanie Mareen”)
17. cut to Tom
18. bloody hands writing “Edited by Tom Cunningham”
19. zoom out of Toms eye
20. shot out of the window of the house seeing the car reverse
21. close up of tom using the gear stick
22. close up of him using the gas
23. camera in the backseat – view through the front side seeing the car leave
24. drives fast and the front lights hit a kid
25. shot from behind the kid looking at the front lights of the car
26. ECU of Tom blinking
27. pow shot of toim and the kid is gone
28. shot through the wind shield on the backseat is a child
29. cu of the child – breath coming out and building the title

Research Sources

In my free time I used a lot of clips on youtube to help me understand special camera effects, sound, lighting and atmosphere. Most of these clips were either movie scenes from Horror or Thriller productions or Trailers. One sequence that helped me a lot for the understanding of sound and music was the legendary shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho".


This taught me the important role music plays in a sequence and made me realise, that music is the one main thing that makes this scene work so perfectly-even though it is so old.


This end scene from "Seven" also helped me a lot with the music, location and atmosphere because all these factors make it work. The scene plays in the middle of nowwhere but still it works because the camera angles and music create a great atmosphere and the audience can feel Brad Pitt's pain that he feels for the loss of his wife.


The beginning sequence of "Casino Royale" helped me a lot because I saw the importance of editing. The way this sequence is edited is very interesting because it is in black and white because it is in the past and the camera cross cuts from the calm conversation to the violent killing scene. The killing scene is cut very quickly and therefore has a good effect on the audience.