Pre-Production: Stage 1 - The First Meeting: Brainstorming and Initial Film Plot Ideas

During the first meeting we also decided to brainstorm and put together ideas for the film plot.

The overall theme of the film had to revolve around the concept of:

"The Greatest Day"

When deciding the plot, we all agreed on a fantasy or over the top style fight scene:

• The use of various weaponry with a increasing climax of tension with the fighting style beginning with hand to hand escalating to melee based weaponry and ultimately guns.

As members of the group and I have had experience with Adobe After Effects we knew this would be possible to do.

Brian and I also decided to go into Canterbury town to scout for locations for filming prior to the meeting.


Initial idea (Lawrence's):

Int Lawrence's room-

Phone receives a text- crash zoom

Something in the text triggers a fantasy in Chi-Yin's head

Cue hot fuzz style gearing up montage

Chi-Yin faces up against an opponent outside in woods

They fight each other using all sorts of weapons that appear, super-powers, melee and guns, all time of combat possible.

Fighting nameless opponent

Chi-Yin wins

Wakes up again in his bed, realizes it's a dream within a dream,

Looks at his phone again. It's another text, this time something mudane, a text from the university about the lectures of the day.

Antagonist could be wearing animal masks and a suit. Every time they get knocked down they recover wearing a different mask. Or disguises to conceal and add ambiguity.

This became the basic perquisite idea which our current script had developed from. We knew that it would involve a fight scene involving various weaponry and disguises.

We decided to develop this concept by finding that we needed a reason for the protagonist to have a motivation for such a fight as the previous concept of fantasy caused from a text seem difficult to do.



We further developed the idea as shown below:

A man is dressed in a prison jumpsuit in a cell. Someone off screen says something like, "Time's up today's the day". The man has a really stupid grin on his face.

He walks outside and checks his wallet, it's empty.

He goes to a library to use the internet.

He sees a pop up for a website where people advertise for a hit-man hits.

He clicks agree on one, and immediately gets a phone call saying,

"Thank you for choosing *name of hit-man service*". "Your chosen target is *name*." "Last known location - *name* woods. Please be discrete!"

Que a tooling up sequence (opens cupboard to see lots of weapons hanging) [similar to Hot Fuzz style montage].

Once tooled up zooms into eye in bedroom, zooms out into woods.

Antagonist walks into shot.

Fight scene ensues.

Just as he's going in for the final blow he pauses, and asks, why does someone want you dead?

Antagonist replies, "Some reason that the audience would agree with but that is funny for example I play with my phone at the cinema"

Protagonist thinks for a second and then says "Yeah you got it coming" and kills him/

Fade to close up of hit-man back in bed looking full and happy.

Zoom out to reveal he is surrounded by empty fried chicken boxes.

We decided to analyse and combine our previous ideas, taking apart and implement new ideas that would improve our plot:

• Instead of a student as protagonist uses someone who is skint

• The target could turn out to be someone known to the hit-man

• Close up of chicken filled mouth for ending

For the concept of the characters Lawrence and I would have to act:

• Broke turned Hit-Man (protagonist played by myself)
• Geek/Nerd culture fan (shown by room decor), likes otaku culture.

• The Mark/Target (antagonist played by Lawrence)
• Mysterious needs an alternate surname. Dark and ambiguous.

Choreography of fighting ideas:

• Begin with hand to hand

• Move onto melee weapons

• Finish with guns

• Ducking and dodging behind logs and trees

• Throwing empty weapons

Taking on board comments from the tutor we decided to change the tone:

• Someone broke who just got fired.

• The hit could be their old boss

• Conceal identity of the boss until just before the protagonist is about to kill them, at which point the boss reveals his face and says it's him. Revenge motivation.

After taking on all these notes we developed a final concept we all agreed with and other members of the team began drafting a script whilst I began research on acting.