Project Summary

  My portfolio project will be a two minute opening scene about a zombie apocalypse. The scene will begin with  a girl going for a walk at night time. As she's walking, there will be a helicopter sound effect as she looks up at the sky. She then sees a figure of a person at the end of the sidewalk, she is confused and alarmed. There is a loud noise coming from her phone, It's an SOS message. The noise from the message causes the figure to turn around, it is revealed that the figure is a zombie. The girl realizes this and becomes scared, she runs away. As she is running away there will be gunshots and screaming sound effects in the background. She runs to a safer spot and there is an explosion. Since I will not be able to actually show the explosion, I plan on just recording her eyes and I will use a bright light to simulate the look of an explosion, I may even edit an explosion in her eyes to make it more believable. 

There will be a match cut to her eyes but this time in daylight, there will be birds chirping in the background and sounds of nature to establish the woods setting. The cut will depict a time jump to show how the girl has survived and is now alone. She will be walking around, trying to find food and shelter. I have two alternate endings before it cuts to the credits which I I'll experiment with and see which one fits best:

1.  As she is walking around, she hears the sound of a zombie and immediately hides behind a tree. There will be a shot of her behind the tree with the camera panning down to her hand where she is holding a switchblade. The camera stays on her hand as we see the legs of the zombie walking in the background, she presses the button on the knife, and the blade deploys. It abruptly cuts to black and the credits roll.

2. The scene will just be the girl walking around the woods long enough to fit into the two minutes. The final shot will be the girl eating food she hunted/scavenged with a slow zoom out as the credits are layered on top of the clip. 

I prefer the first idea but it may be challenging to create and also leaves on a cliffhanger which makes it more of a short film than an opening. The second option is easier and makes it more of a casual opening, but may not make it clear enough that it is a zombie film.