Creating the plot for our thriller

Initially, each person in our team of three came up with rough ideas for our thriller film. We wanted to make sure that we came up with a plausible plot that worked with the entire film rather than just the first two minutes. The intro can seem quite contrived and may lose its enigma if the directors are not aware of the events that take place after the first 3 minutes of the film. We initially thought of setting the story around a man who suffers from severe amnesia and finds himself held captive but doesnt know where he is or how he got there. The story and information on other characters would unravel as our amnesiac protagonist slowly begins to discover the truth to why he is held captive, and who wants to get him. We thought that this film idea was ok but it links very closely to Memento and would probably be considered a copy of Memento. We also thought that it would be very hard to portray the mans amnesia in a timescale of 23 minutes. We settled on a very promising idea that revolves around a diary. Our rough idea so far is that the diary was owned by a young teen and the entries in the diary are a narration that slowly uncover the reason why the teen has been murdered, and who murdered him. This idea also allows us to create very interesting visual effects, we can use mise en scene to reference to the diary entries and expose text in a way that can link to the overall theme of the diary. We began looking briefly into the general structure of a film screenplay in order to be able to structure a rough idea of the entire film. In doing this it will make it easier to make small references to the enigma and the overall plot and characters within our intro. We used a basic three-act structure and used it to fit our plot to. The inciting incident would be the discovery of the childs death and we would follow either a detective or the childs mother as (s)he finds a diary that reveals information about the childs death, which was originally thought to be a suicide. The mother/detective would overcome obstacles such as dead-ends and close friends that tell our protagonist to give up and accept the apparent truth. The climax would be the conflict between the protagonist and the true killer, which would result in either one of them to die, or both.