Timeline

Structure and Approach

Today during class we discussed the plot of our film opening and the order of it. The timeline of our story is not shown in order in the film because we have structured it differently to create a more intriguing opening. In our approach we are going to establish the tone and evoke mystery of the plot. The reason we are starting off with mystery is because the protagonist of the story has amnesia due to a concussion. Since the protagonist doesn’t remember his past, it makes the audience feel the same and connected to him in the way that both do not know what is happening. The mystery will be established leading the audience confused and intrigued for further development of the story. The way we’re going to establish the tone is by the editing and speed of cuts and clips, dark lighting, and music in the background that builds up until it climaxes at the title card. We took a lot of inspiration from movies like: Perks of being a wildflower, Black Widow, and Star Wars. In the film The Perks of Being a Wildflower one of the characters had past trauma which he got reminded of when he was in asimilar situation. Our protagonist, like the character, gets flashbacks of his trauma when he hears or sees something of his past. From Star Wars, the twist at the end of our story where the protagonist finds out that the person who inflicted his trauma is his mother, is like when Luke Skywalker finds out that Darth Vader, also the villain in the story, is his father. 

Storyline

Our story is about a boy (the lost file) who is raised by his mother Beth in an unconventional way. Beth is a woman who runs a company that socially experiments and exploits children to see how children raised a certain way interact in the real world. Beth has children from different races and of different ages who she does these experiments on. One boy, the lost file, manages to escape the place but while he is running he runs into a pole and is knocked unconscious. He gets amnesia from this and the people who become his adopted parents find him lying on the road. He now lives in a loving home where he doesn’t remember anything before he escaped. He is 17 years old now when he starts to hear words that seem familiar to him, almost like deja vu. His coworkers (who are his siblings) start to hint at him that something is wrong. One day he receives an email with files of children all being told to do the same thing. He has flashbacks to blocked out traumatic moments when he sees these and calls one of his coworkers because he now knows they are related to this issue. 

Audience perspective

The audience will see this story in a different way. It will begin with shots of the protagonist finding the files with credits cutting back and forth as well as the protagonist’s reaction. After, a title card will appear with the words ‘The Lost File’ as that is the title of our film opening. The cut will lead into a scene of the siblings working together as coworkers. The way the audience will know that they are siblings is because the file shots of the kids in the old camera will have the same names as the coworkers. For example: if one of the kids is called Daisy it will say Daisy on the file camera shot and Daisy on the coworkers name tag. 

The next thing we will begin to work on is the storyboard. We wanted to fully determine the plot before we made the storyboard and shot list. Some notes from today’s class: