Initial Ideas - Our First Rough Story Board

 SCHIZOPHRENIA 

After many considerations, we have finalised our choice of sub genre, opting for a psychological film opening. The photos posted here are the very first initial sketches I drew to plan ideas.

We have decided to use a girl character (details will be in our character post) of adolescence, with dark hair and pale skin. She has a serious condition known as SCHIZOPHRENIA: a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behaviour, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.

The girl acquired the condition from a cause in her life - this could be either of the following: insecurity, sexual/ physical/ mental abuse, drug abuse, a broken home, social isolation, inheritance, too much dopamine in the brain, or stressful past events that have triggered her problem.

The girl can see herself, almost like an out of body experience exchanged between her split personality. She looks at her altar-ego, wearing black contacts/ dark, grudge-like clothes, but she is emotionless and blank, unaware of the deadly person in front of her (the other side of her personality). The sequence will then go on to show her normal self in the tunnel (one of our definite location ideas), running, and walking, away from something - she is frightened, confused, vulnerable. The feelings are all in her mind as the shots go back and forth between her usual self and a crippled, manic, crazy protagonist. This, we plan, is to be shown in reverse order, using a rewinding technique that we can edit in, almost as if she is returning back out of her out of body experience, but her mindset is so dark, so sad and dangerous.

The setting will be dark, minimal, and relatively normal, to stick with psychological conventions, and we will shoot at indoor locations, apart from any running scenes. Music and sound will be low - we want an eerie, still atmosphere, abruptly filled with fuzzing, discomforting sounds to slice through the silence, to translate the way in which her brain is working and functioning through to the audience. Therefore, creating a real sense of detachment from the normality of humanity.

Films that have inspired our ideas:

• Black Swan
• Grudge
• Memento