Storyboard and Planning of SILENT NIGHT our THRILLER

Before drawing our storyboard, we discussed how we wanted the story to go in the first 2 minutes, and wrote this down in note-style in the order of camera shots/storyline:

From these notes, we drew up a suitable story board which we thought represented what we wanted our thriller to:

Some changes we made to the storyboard were;

• We didn't begin with a separate picture of a child as we thought it would be too confusing if the kidnapper had a picture of him as well; this would also ruin the audiences' chances of empathising with her.
• We didn't play 'twinkle little star' during the thriller as we felt once watching it that the music didn't sound right, and we changed the name from 'Little Star' to 'Silent Night' as we felt this was a more adult approach which would be more likely to entice our target audience of young/adults.
• We didn't use a flashback of the kidnapper rocking her child to sleep; although we filmed this, we felt it just looked ridiculous and unbelieveable as the child is 5 years old and he looked too big to be rocked to sleep!
• We didn't use a specific toy for the child to leave behind when he went missing as we felt more emotion would be evoked if we just shot an empty space where the child was.
• We changed the order of the flashbacks and added addtitional ones to amplify the significance of certain clips and create more enigma and empathy within the audience.
• We didn't film the kidnapper taking the child as we didn't want to give the storyline away; although it is suggested the woman is the kidnapper, we thought we could use this as a red herring, and we thought there was more enigma if both characters disappeared.
• We didn't use the 'one month later' shots, as although we filmed them, we felt this was too much information to put in the first 2 minutes and we wanted to keep that curiosity going.
• Instead of having the last shot as the mother and the kidnapper & child looking out of their windows to show the two sides to the story, we used the flashback of the graveyard shots as we felt this would create more empathy for the kidnapper and was a more emotional, intriguing scene to end on.