Planning: Treatment

The treatment was written up by Titus Goremucheche as part of the disscusion by Team Black Hat.

This is the Treatment for “BlackHat Films” and here we are going to briefly explain what you will expect to see in our opening scene for our horror movie. This summaries the basics that are going to be there, as full treatment will be up shortly, when the production team finalizes everything that will be included in the opening.

The first that will appear to the audience is a non-diegetic sound of a mother’s cry, in a ghostly and sinister way; the cry is very distant and as the opening titles appears which include the production company name. The font type for the title will appear in white and change colour to red with blood for a split second, which will get the audience in the right frame of mind that they are watching a horror movie. As the opening titles are playing we hear a diegetic sound of rain banging against a window. Then we get our first code of a camera shot panning from the ground to a boy who is laying down on the bed, his on his phone when we first see him and his about to go to sleep, as that shot place through we get the titles of the people who are playing a major part in the movie for example, the directors, producers, music by and the actors. These titles will play for approximately 20 seconds of the opening. Then we cut to a point of view shot of him putting down the phone because it’s raining and there is no signal, when he puts his phone down he goes to sleep. As we get those first two shots we don’t hear and non-diegetic sound the only sound we hear is all diegetic, the rain on the window, the boy moving on the bed and him placing his phone on the table near his bed. We then cut to a close up of the boy closing his eyes as his sleeping, then the camera shot will zoom out to show the room in a bit more detail, his room is dark and gloomy and you can sense that his not the only person in that room because there’s a shadow that moves really quickly in front of the camera, the reason why there is a showdown that will move fast across the camera is so that we can get the audience to jump so in other words a false scare.

Then we start to hear non-diegetic which is quiet in the background and it sounds like a lullaby but we want to make it sound that it doesn’t sound exactly like a lullaby because we want to audience to remember that sound because it will appear a few times in the opening. As the non-diegetic sounds plays we cut into the boy’s dream, where we can see a woman hanging herself in his room. As this scene plays out the non-diegetic will be slow and very eerie. As the woman hangs herself, the boy having the dream tries to save her but he cannot move his stuck in his bed and when he tries to speak to the woman his voice doesn’t come out as she’s hanging herself she sings a lullaby, the effect on this is so that the audience can piece together the non-diegetic lullaby sounds they heard when they got that false scare.

He then tries tries had to get out of bed and falls down but as he falls down off his bed it cuts to a part where his fell off his bed in real life and he looks at his phone to see the time and its 02:15 in the morning. He then gets back into bed and he sleeps on his side face with an extreme close up of his eyes, he then hears someone singing a lullaby behind him and he slowly turns to see who it is and as he turns the camera zooms out slowly as is zooms out it shows a figure which seems to be sitting beside his bed as he turns to look he sees n

othing because the creature has disappeared. With sigh of relief because there was nothing there but his still confused he closes his eyes and looks up and a deformed thing on his ceiling and it jumps towards him, this processes will play out slowly as he looks up then the scene will play very quickly as the creature jumps at him at this point the non-diegetic music has picked up and is very loud. The creature is screaming at the boy. He manages to escape into a different room but in doing so he trips up and falls down but luckily he get into the room in which the creature can’t get him. Then we hear scratches from above the boys head as he looks up the creature is there and it cuts to the title of the movie which is still to be discussed within the group.

The non- diegetic sound will be loud to scare the audience then it will slowly fade away. That will be the end of our opening scene, we include quite a few conventions for example, no signal, falling over, and the false scares that we have with the shadow moving across the camera. The aim for this horror movie is to be different to any other cliché horror movie, we like to think that, making a difference is better than following the norm and that’s why we think that having the title of the movie and the end of that little opening is a good idea because its different to what other people will do. We also aim to use the basic conventions that we see in popular films, so running into a room in which the only way out is to face the villain directly, also the use of no signal on the phone also gives the sense that you know the character is going to have something bad happen to them.

This treatment was done by the “BlackHat Films” production team and we have all generated our ideas to the page and soon to the stage, everyone had a fair amount of input into this treatment and we hope that we can produce a piece of work that will be interesting to watch and leave the audience interested in watching the rest of the film.