Pre Production (Planning Outline)

The most important part of creating an opening scene or film is planning. This can include defining the general information of the film, the audience, film crew and cast, logline, characters, supporting characters, the setting of the world, narrative structure, exposition, and shot lists. In this blog, I will introduce all these elements through a planning sheet my teammates and I completed in the early stages of pre production. 

To start of with, knowing the general information of your film and the audience is key in creating an effective film or opening scene. The title of our movie is "Caught Up", which is meant to be a action/comedy film that is PG-13, and expresses the theme that someone should not trust everyone. A detailed synopsis of what our audience for this film is can be seen in the image below. 

Next, we discussed and created a visual representation of the roles my teammates I would have during production. This is the film crew and cast, which includes the production manager, director, film writer, cinematographer, production designer, casting director, wardrobe and makeup artist, camera operator, editor, and screenwriter. 

Another component of the planning of the film is creating a logline. A logline is a one-sentence description of a movie, which can include elements of our screenplay such as the main character, setup, central conflict, and antagonist. A visual representation of this can be seen below. 

Defining your characters is also vital in creating a sufficient movie that people will enjoy and relate to. To do this, my teammates and I created a chart that depicts how the main character and supporting characters of our film can be described. These elements can include the characters age, gender, ethnicity, identity or title, social status, abilities, moral values, struggles, costume, hair/makeup. and props. Additionally, we discussed what the setting of the world our film will be based in and comprised in into a chart. All of this information can be seen in the charts below.

Lastly, my teammates I created a Save the Cat Beat Sheet in our planning to get an understanding of the narrative we will portray in our opening scene. This is vital in creating a screenplay outline as it identities the critical moments of a film and lays out the elements that need to be implemented to each story's act. Moreover, the beat sheet separates your accounts into acts and makes the story flow smoothly thought its crucial moments. For the opening scene, we only focused on creating ACT I of the beat sheet, which includes the opening image, theme-stated/introduction, setup, and the hook. This can be seen below along with the exposition of our film.