Planning: Treatment For Our Film Opening

From having another Google Docs session - this time creating a cluster of ideas for our opening two minutes - we have come to the conclusion of having our killer first walk into shot from the p.o.v of a mirror (with diegetic footsteps) - without showing his face - putting on his gas mask and headphones. When the headphones are fully on his head, the previously tinny sounding Camille Saint-Saens: Danse Macabre will be playing clearly (and non-dietetically) - with match on action showing the killer preparing and using the chemicals. My ideas were in yellow, Wik's were in blue, and Emma's were purple.

When preparing for the first kill - and committing it - almost every shot will be close up, focusing on the similar actions between making the chemicals and using them - making match on action and flicking between the two. There will also be sounds edited in to make the chemical sound as if it is burning the victim's flesh. For our titles, we'll overlay them onto our two minutes and end with a physical neon sign saying 'TOXIC" and flickering in a pitch black room. We'll do this with zooming in on something black in a chemical shot, then zooming back out of the shot - expect the camera now comes from inside the 'O' of the toxic - and finally, the killer walks past.

Planning: Target Audience and Potential Openings

After presenting our 60-second pitch - and getting 'greenlighted' - we then created a synopsis for 'Toxic'; 

"Far into the future, in the year 2XXX, twelve influential families dominate the city in which they live. Each one is designated with its own crest, deriving from the Chinese Zodiac Calendar; their adolescent heirs, all close friends, carry their family legacies. However, things quickly take a turn for the worst. One of the friends is discovered as a decomposing corpse in a pool of mysterious glowing toxin, and the only clue to the killer’s identity comes in the form of a fortune cookie. After that, it becomes a race against time. Isolated from any outside help, the friends must put the pieces together and stop the murderer – both their own lives, and that of the next generation, is at stake. "

So from this, we made a survey (on surveymonkey.co.uk) which included our film title and synopsis - resulting in the following feedback;

 Most of the opinions we collected were from our target audience (being 15+), and we've learnt that the preferred genres are psychological and science fiction films - which are the genres of Toxic! We were overwhelmed with the amount of positive feedback we got back, and had some really creative ideas offered to us; such as the killer being shown preparing for the slaughter and showing the city it happens in to set the scene for the futuristic world.