My film is about a girl (Shelley) that finds a cursed doll hidden in the loft of her home which unbeknownst to her traps her mother (her mother is presumed dead). Leading her to be put into an orphanage where she is put in a room with two other girls. They are horrifically transformed by the dolls curse leaving Shelley to find the truth and perhaps save her Mother, I want the ending to be ambiguous.
I started my storyboards from the doll’s POV.
I began the shot looking from inside the box through the keyhole with little light, it then moves up to a mouth, an eye and finally zooms out to a young girls face. Although I liked this sequence it set the pace to slow for the beginning of my film which being a horror needs to be quite fast, leading quickly to a dramatic event.
After this, it cuts to a long shot of the girl exploring the box and finding a key at it’s base which she uses to open it. I drew her flinching away from her first glimpse inside the box, afraid at what was inside and then timidly look again and discover the doll. She sits in awe of the doll until the last shot, where her mother calls for her.
As this whole sequence of looking in the box, finding the key, opening the box and finding the doll would take a long time I decided to take out the key altogether. Had it stayed I felt it would have also created a hole in the story because I had built it up as an important object for opening the box and as such having it float around as I had originally intended would have been illogical. I was going to have Shelley’s Mother slam the box and lock it and then have Shelley come back that night to get the doll. If the key were important Shelley would have kept it hidden, meaning her mother couldn’t then lock the doll away again or Shelley’s Mother would have taken and hidden it meaning that Shelley couldn’t have got the doll back. It’s for these reasons I feel justified in completely cutting this from the film.
Next there was to be a scene of conversation between Shelley and her mother. Shelley’s Mother asks what she has been doing and in response, Shelley shows the doll. At this point her mother becomes erratic and panicky, pulling Shelley from the loft hatch and sending her off to bed. Her mother then shoves the doll back in the box and slams it shut. It then cuts to later that evening with Shelley being tucked in by her Mother and refusing a goodnight kiss. Her mother instead kisses the pillow.
It match cuts to a scene later that night where Shelley ventures back inside the loft and takes the doll. She goes back to her room to sleep but when she wakes up in the morning it has gone. She walks to her Mother’s room to find a pool of blood, the doll sitting on her Mother’s bed and her Mother no where to be seen.
The realisation dawned that it took far too long to set up the story and get to the dramatic event at the end of this scene. In my story Shelley still needs to go to the orphanage, see the children there meet a bloody end and have the story resolve. I decided instead to incorporate the important parts of these boards (Shelley finding the doll, Shelley’s Mother putting it back, Shelley refusing a goodnight kiss, going back for the doll and losing her Mother) into a flash back whilst at the orphanage.
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