The Final Pitch

We are creating a film in the genre of Psychological thriller, we chose this genre because we felt as if we could take this film to whatever extent we wanted to and we could make it almost completely our own as we wanted to make a film that was ‘stretching the boundaries’. The psychological thriller genre has many different conventions, which we have researched, things like a common twist, darkness, mirrors, blood and mental disorders. From research these conventions were the most general from films we had seen for example Sinister, insidious, Black swan and Saw. Taking these conventions into account when developing our trailer made easy from analysing and evaluating other films of the same genre and inserting these conventions was vital so as our target audience of young adults would be able to recognise these semantic elements and relate them to a film in the psychological thriller genre.

Our production is cleverly called ‘Plan C’ due to the narrative revolving around a main character- Roxanne, and her three personalities. This is where we incorporated the common convention of mental disorders as we gave our protagonist Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Roxanne is given two other personalities alongside her own, called Ava and Vivienne, these three personas battle against each other for control, each having their own partners and entirely different lives – Ava is a lesbian, although this is not made a big deal of in our trailer and it is seen as a normal relationship, her girlfriend is called Rose and she becomes a major role in our trailer, Vivienne is a darker personality and her partner is called Evan, who is only a minor role. This all relates to why the film is called ‘Plan C’ because we are trying to symbolise how Roxanne’s third personality (Ava) is has appeared the most recently but is now the most mentally stable character, in other words she would be the first choice if you could choose one personality to keep.

When we decided that our leading role was going to have a mental disorder to abide by conventions, we immediately tried to think up the disorder that was the least commonly used in films and also that we could make our story really interesting with, from research MPD was what we discovered as the most unique and we knew we could do a lot with this as really we could have done as many personalities as we wanted, although we decided on a reasonably small number of three. MPD was then the highlight of our researching and we found different psychological studies such as the study of Eve White, who throughout her lifetime claimed to have 50 different personalities. We also did research of MPD in other films such as Lord of The Rings, in which Gollum was the focus of the research and we watched several videos on his character and ended up posting one on our blogs.

Roxanne goes through the stresses of daily life alongside these changes in personality, which are out of her control, she reveals personal secrets as Ava to Rose, and once Rose understands she begins to get concerned. Rose accidentally discusses the personalities with Roxanne instead of Ava and after gaining evidence of the different personalities Roxanne is driven mad and begins plotting ways to get rid of the other personalities and anyone who stood in her way, she decides that the best way is to kill off the other personalities partners but this only succeeds with Evan, and Ava knowing the plans kills Tate and is left as the controlling personality to live happily ever after with Rose.