Pre-Production

The location of our actual thriller opening sequence will be the basement of a factory, and this is the setting of our entire scene. We don’t have an actual location like this to film our test shoot in, but this will be easy to work around because the entire scene just uses a single room. So, we decided to film our test shoot in the common room.

There are only two characters visible on-screen in our opening sequence, and the second only appears in the end briefly. This makes it simpler for us to just use two people from our four-person group as actors, and we still have all the characters that are focused on in our scene.

As it will be difficult to show that the main character has a bomb chained to him in our test shoot, we will instead try to convey this through a replacement prop such as a phone. However, this opening sequence is still relatively simple to film throughout, as most of the action happens off-screen. It also uses minimal props and only one room as the setting, so none of the shoots should be too difficult.

The time bomb is the prop most focused on in our opening sequence, but we cannot use a realistic prop for our test shoot. We will substitute this with a VHS cassette and use an iPhone as the timer. We plan to have chains attaching the time bomb to the main character, and we will imitate this by using a scarf. The oil drums and barrels we will show in our opening sequence can be replaced by wastepaper bins.