Proposed New Opening Sequence

The scene starts on the tube. A girl is sitting down, alone, with her headphones in, loud music blaring out. We see clusters of people on the tube, all with their phones out, texting and showing each other things excitedly. A man approaches her and taps her on the shoulder. She takes out both her earphones to look at the man, and we hear the tube is in total silence. He stands, staring at her, his phone out, when we hear her phone buzz, piercing the silence. She looks around at all the other groups of kids, they are texting each other frantically and yet none of them speak. She pulls her phone out of her pocket; she has a text. 'You dropped your purse :-)' The man points to the floor, at her purse, then moves away. She picks it up, and steps off the tube, as her voiceover comes in. For the remainder of the scene, we hear an intermittent voiceover from the girl. She speaks slowly, bleakly. We cut to her arriving home to a silent house. She walks into the front room, her younger brother is playing on a games console. He pulls out his phone as she watches, and simultaneously texts her with one hand while playing the game with the other hand. She reads the text: 'Mum wants to talks to you'. She leaves the room and moves to the kitchen. We expect her to greet her mum and maybe talk about how their days have been, but instead she gets out her phone and types away in silence. This serves as an anticlimax for the whole sequence and leaves the audience wanting to know why nobody communicates vocally. Her mother types back on an ipad, and we see a closeup of the phone with her response, something like 'Hard day at work. How was your day?' The girl texts back then goes upstairs and immediately logs onto her laptop. On her homepage, there is a news article about a scientist who has been arrested on suspicion of developing voiceboxes in a lab. Before she has a chance to read it, her phone buzzes again: dinner is ready. She gets up and leaves her room, leaving the camera to zoom in on the article so it is the last thing the audience sees. As this is a very simple idea, a chronological narrative which just sets the scene for the rest of the film we can be really elaborate and artistic with our shots, with lots of focus pulls and titled frames and whip pans to demonstrate our technical ability and accompany a creative storyline (written and adapted by group members).