Our thriller idea

Originally, Holly, Joe and I wanted to start with a man running through London, possibly Chinatown. We really liked the idea of just him being in colour, and everything else around him being black and white. We began working a story line around this idea, and thought of having a girl murdered in her flat. We thought it would be interesting if the sequence switched from past to present throughout, going back to when the girl is alive then forward to the murderer running away.

This later on evolved into the idea of having the girls clips running backwards to create a more psychologically messed up effect. When we thought about this in more detail we realised that this wouldn't really make sense at all, and that we needed her clips to end with her opening the door to the murderer. We couldn't do this if she was going backwards. We then decided that the idea was relatively basic and wouldn't create enough tension for the sort of thriller we wanted.

We re-looked at our ideas, and decided to make it about a stalker. We got a lot of inspiration from the film 'One Hour Photograph', particularly Robin Williams' character. We thought of having the stalker looking at photographs of the girl. This would look normal at first, but then you'd realise that it wasn't him in the photos with her, it was another man. We decided this would be a bit boring and not tense enough.

Instead of having the girl and the stalker in two separate time lines, we decided to make one continuous piece of footage. We thought of the idea of the girl getting ready to go out, loud music blaring, creating a really energetic and good atmosphere. Then as she'd leave she'd switch the music and lights off, so that when the stalker entered her home, it would be completely silent and dark. We wanted to have him sniffing her clothes, and pulling hair out of her hairbrush, doing genuinely creepy things that would make the audience shudder. When we presented the idea, the class seemed to like it which boosted our confidence.