Narrative Concept

NARRATIVE:

'After a drunken night, a hungover young man wakes up to a smashed house and covered in blood. Whilst attempting to piece together the events of the previous night, he stumbles upon a dead girl in his kitchen. Desperate to destroy the evidence before his parents return home, he dumps the body in the shed and clears up the house. When his unsuspecting parents return to the family home, no signs of the hectic night before are to be seen.... until a text reveals to them that the young guy had decided to hold a house party (that went out of hand quickly!) and the girl isn't dead but in a drunken slumber'

The narrative we have chosen is quite complex to communicate to an audience, especially after establishing the piece as a horror, only to undermine it as a comedy. In order for this to be successful, we will have to ensure that all aspects of our film are accurate: camerawork must draw the audience's attention to key props in shots (ie. smashed glass to communicate the idea of violence), a parallel soundtrack will have to be used to establish the genre as horror in order to undermine it as a comedy successfully and editing will have to be used creatively to communicate the sense of urgency in only five minutes!

Whilst discussing our narrative, we decided to focus our film for a working class/lower middle class demographic, between the ages of 16-25. We believe our narrative is better suited for a male audience; despite this, we would not catergorize it as a 'male' film as it will also appeal to females as well (although, not as much as a male audience). The main justification for aiming our film at this audience is the theme of violence - the shock value of films like the Saw franchise and The Human Centipede seem to appeal to this audience, with special focus on gore. However, the narrative twist of a disobedient youth holding a house party and trying desperately to cover it up is a concept that our audience can identify with and one that is common in sitcoms aimed at this audience.

GENRE: horror, comedy, narrative twist

Our main influence concerning genre is Ratthe's short film, Lovefield (set up link to 'Lovefield' research). The main appeal of this film for our group was the concept of establishing one genre and then contradicting that with another genre in the closing section of the piece.

It is an ambitious narrative to attempt to convey to an audience; however, we can draw upon the skills we gained during our AS portfolio, in which we had to create a thriller opening. The research into conventions of this genre can be applied to horror, with techniques that create mystery and suspense allowing us to create 'jumps'.