Our aim for the unit F632 creative
artifact was to produce a short film in the Thriller genre, that is
linked to the representation of mystery and unknown in my textual
analysis. The sequence is about a man (Adam) who has been abducted
from his work and put into a dark loft space. He is then beaten up by
a man named Scythe while Adam’s friend Rachel, a government spy,
listens helplessly from a phone sat in the room. We wanted to make
the film open with suspense, so we used briefly flash Adam on the
screen as the light is turning on. Then, a series of establishing
shots within the loft space to set the scene. This way the audience
is left wondering what is going on. These static shots are like those
that start in the film Moon. (Duncan Jones) These shots give
the impression that you are trapped inside this small space, with no
escape. As a photography student, I already had a good understanding
of composition and lighting, and therefore had a good idea on how the
film was going to look. We used dim lighting within our scene to make
the space seem smaller by lighting as little of the room as possible.
Most of the shots are conventional tripod shots with little movement.
We wanted to keep the shots static because the loft space was small
and we wanted to make it feel even smaller. Therefore, time was spent
framing up the shots as not to reveal the whole room. This was a
restriction, but it helped in developing the atmosphere of the film.
The point of view shots are there to show how disorientated Adam is.
To achieve this we created a storyboard
that showed all of the shots we needed to use within the scene. We
focused more on the visual aspects of the storyboard, as they were
more useful out in the field. We took these on our locations to guide
us through setting up the shots. The storyboard went along side with
the script and helped plan what dialogue to film from each angle. Not
having a strict storyboard helped keep things open for change and
allow for creative decisions to be made in the field. However It may
have hindered our progress as sometimes we hade to rethink sequences
in order for them to work in our small space.
I feel, despite not finishing the film
(due to actors dropping out) we were successful at achieving most of
the aims for that we set out at the beginning of the project.
Throughout the production we changed the plot of the story several
times to make it less violent, as we learnt that our sequence would
me drastically more effective as a thriller. As in Super 8
(J.J. Abrams) where the monster is hidden from the audience until
towards the end of the sequence. One reason why the sequence begins
with such a long opening with little sign as to what is going on.
This is also why we chose to have our villain approach from behind so
that Adam does not see him until the last second, where Adam is
punched. One significant change we made was removing Rachael’s
physical presence from the scene all-together. It was decided to
remove her because we felt the sequence would be too insensitive of
we had some misogynous content. It was decided to take an element
from The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan) were the Joker has
captured Harvey Dent and Rachael Dawes (one reason we named our
female actor Rachael) and put them in a room full of explosives. The
two of them are connected through a phone, so they can hear each
other but can provide nothing but comfort. We felt that putting a
phone with Rachael’s voice in it acting as Adam’s lifeline added
so much more to the scene. Having it there really showed that Adam
had little to no hope of rescue. All Rachael can do is listen. We
decided to cast Daniel Dennis (17) as Adam for out sequence because
he fit the innocent nature of Adam because of his rounded face.
Daniel was also willing to visualize the ideas we had in our head and
therefore was able to carry out the instructions we gave to him.
However, given more time, we would have put more consideration into
casting and maybe have casted someone different. We cast Emily
Hallett as Rachael, who provided the voice that is seen coming from
the phone.
