Introduction

Hi, my name is Alexa Zuckerman and I'm going to be taking you through the journey my partner, Ellie Sachs, and I  encounter creating our film opening. Day one began with lots of brainstorming; Ellie and I defiently had more bad ideas than good. Our first thought of how to start was to pick a genre we believe we could create the best possible opening for.

In order to keep all possible types of genres in mind we used Filmsite's list of  genres                           ( http://www.filmsite.org/genres.html ), which contained nearly all genres possible. Immediately, we both nixed out most genres including comedy (mostly because we can't create a humorous script very well), action ( due to lack of props),romance ( due to not having two solid actors), and the others due to the lack of interest we had in them. We believed we would be best at making either a mystery movie or a Sci-Fi comedy because those are our two favorite genres and have both seen lots of movies within those genres. Shortly after we narrowed our search I came up with a Sci-Fi opening idea: It would feature a switch on two peoples' personalities that were on different end of the spectrums, whether it was one rich or one poor, or one popular and the other more of a loner. We concluded that this idea lacked originality because it sounded a lot like the movie ,"Freaky Friday, and started to think of alternative ideas in the mystery genre.

After discussing common characteristics of a mystery movie on teach scholastic ( http://teacher.scholastic.com/reading/bestpractices/comprehension/genrechart.pdf ) , we decided that it would be the best fit for us. Reading the common characteristics almost instantaneously gave me an idea: a murder mystery. Ellie loved it as much as I did and we began creating a storyline. We decided that it would have to based around a girl being kidnapped in her hometown. We chose this so one of us could easily fit the role and be able to act in the film. Also we decided that we needed a creative way to display credits. We want to add something that would make our film opening unique, and the credits were a way we were going to try. We thought long and hard about this and came to the conclusion that the setting would be in a lab room environment, with the girl kept hostage inside. Our credits would be written on elements in the room used to " test" the girl and other creepy things we decided we would choose later on.

As our planning session was coming to the end we chose on the idea of using a newscast to explain the storyline behind the mysterious girl. Clearly the newscast wouldn't give away to much, but it would be just the right amount to keep the viewers wanting more. We decided next time we met we would continue on adding elements to the story to give it more of a mysterious feel.

"Film Genres." An Award-winning, Unique Resource of Film Reference Material for Film Buffs and Others, with Reviews of Classic American-Hollywood Films, Academy Awards History, Film Posters. Amc Networks, n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2017

http://teacher.scholastic.com/reading/bestpractices/comprehension/genrechart.pdf