SECOND POTENTIAL IDEA

Simultaneously, we came up with another potential idea centred on a woman portrayed through two timelines as the mundane and cheerful space of her house transforms into the dark setting for a gruesome murder committed by her. The concept relied heavily on visual contrast to convey the enormity of what the woman had done, emphasising the transformative nature of the murder committed without remorse and leaving the audience wondering how her seemingly normal life would change from here.

we did not use the, why...?

For the first story, however, we struggled to flesh the idea out in a way that satisfied, among other things, the representation aspect of our film opening which we really wanted to play an important role in the project. Moreover, not being able to create a satisfying enough cold open would not have been, well, satisfying either.

For the second, we were skeptical that showing a murder, or even just the aftermath of one would be easy to execute in a way that wasn’t unintentionally funny, especially given our non-existent budget—only there’s so much realism you can wring from very cheap, very fake blood (that was perhaps the least of our problems but the point still stands). Similar to the hitman story, our brain cells refused to cooperate in fleshing out the technicalities of this one after the initial excitement of pursuing a shiny new idea wore off.

We resorted to coming up with a few themes we would like to incorporate into our film opening and decided that we would use those to base our idea on after the unwelcome realization that most of our ideas were half-baked and needed more of a sense of direction.

Tashfa also came to the conclusion that after studying primarily Western film narrative conventions, we were struggling to come up with a story that would satisfy Western film conventions while also being easy to execute realistically in our context; that is to say, it seemed like we needed to move more in the direction of a narrative based on things we knew well rather than a meager imitation of narratives so far removed from our own, e.g. brown boys. As a result, now that the reputed hitman and cold-blooded femme fatale have been laid to rest, we thought it would be best to stick to themes and ideas more familiar to us.

After much deliberation and more zoom meetings than my anxious self could handle, all of the group members and I agreed that a subtle identity crisis and queer representation could be ideas we could investigate in a Pakistani context.

OUR FINAL 

IF OUR TEACHER LIKES IT... THAT IS....