I was assigned the task of fleshing out the story of our preliminary task while collaborating with the team during the idea development, which you can see reflected in the first draft of our script. However, the script and narrative changed largely over the course of production when we started thinking of what would be achievable for us.
Thus, here is a sort of story outline or narrative breakdown of our preliminary task.
The opening scene’s narrative quickly transformed from the very tentative bare-bones:
To something slightly less we came up with this in six minutes while sitting on the floor of our school’s multi-media room:
A girl: covered in injuries, clad in a hospital gown. The steady sound of a ticking bomb dominates the soundscape; the girl’s fingers tapping along the non-diegetic sound are in sync with it to an uncanny degree. Various close-ups—of her mouth, her hands, her eyes—create an unsettling mood. People passing by the girl in the hospital lobby, a nurse and a doctor, seem oblivious to her presence despite her dishevelled and apparent appearance. Their conversation introduces the catalyst into the story—a bombing at a train station. The girl keeps her gaze fixed on the passers-by, her lips curved in an unnerving smile. When the doctor sits down in her office to fill in the death confirmation document of a deceased person who passed away at the site of the bombing, the girl approaches her from behind. Whether she is a ghost, a resurrected corpse, or a demon, whether she intends to harm the doctor or wants something else—the audience is kept in the dark for now.
We decided to go with a sort of cold-open* scene which makes it very hard to discern where it will lead, which could be interpreted as a nod to Barthes’ notion of the hermeneutic code, a reflection of the way we ourselves were unsure about how the story would unfold, or a combination of both.
*I particularly kept the openings of The Lighthouse (2019) and Saint Maud (2019) in mind while contributing to this task, as the use of sound as a device to create tension and unsettle the audience, and introducing the film to the audience with a lot of mystery instead of exposition were techniques I found incredibly fascinating
Even as a cold-open, we tried to make every element of it such that they all might weave together into an incomplete image but one the audience would want to see fully revealed. Still, as this was our first time producing a whole mini film opening as a group, the story wasn’t really nuanced or all that intriguing.
The minimum narrative details revealed within this opening scene, however, do set the atmosphere of the film which is essential for the horror genre. As the scene unfurls, the character of the girl is also established in a way that creates a lot of questions within the spectator’s mind gradually: Who is she? Why is she covered in wounds even though she is in a hospital and should be treated? Why don’t or can’t passersby see her? Was she, too, a victim of the bombing at the train station? What does she want from the doctor? Why is she walking around even though she seems to be dead? And so on.
The narrative of preliminary film opening, therefore, employs enigma as the primary element which hooks the audience.
In this way, we managed to loosely incorporate all the elements given to us as prompts during the six minute challenge into this task: horror (genre); a train station (setting); a churail/ghost (character type); and a bomb (object).
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