On tuesday 9th feb we spent the whole day focusing on how to improve our coursework. The first thing we questioned was "is it cliché?". The fact our piece is focused a lot on the woods with a girl tied up and flashbacks being dragged made us overlook the idea that there isn't much originality in our story line. We talked over many ideas on how to change the focus of the story to something better. We discussed the new edited rough-cut, and noticed that the flashbacks weren't obvious enough making the flow of the images unclear. We thought the slow continuos pace was effective, but when peers watched it they felt bored after the first two fades of the woods. From this we decided to cut the 45second introduction of setting the wood scene to just two or three 5second fades.
This cut our time length greatly and had
to re-think how to produce an effective two minut
es. We were advised that we had to many repeated shots. Too many close ups of the hands and gagged mouth meant the had to change the focus somehow. We thought about more flashbacks following the story of how she got there more, but decided they weren't effective enough.
Our story is one of a Psychological Thriller, which restricts the amount of styles filming we achieved. We talked about combining two ge
nres, and decided a western thriller would work well mixing up the style of the story. Shots such as jump cuts from two characters in a duel would be converted to fast jump cuts from the an
tago
nist to the victim from their point of views.
It started to feel like we were changing our whole original idea so when back to thinking of the shots we already have available to use. The ones we liked best where the disorientating trees, and a e.c.u with the camera on the floor filming
the gagged lips. Because a lot of the shots were taken from a third person perspective,
we changed it to the perspective of mainly the antagonists. To stay away from the obvious, the antagonist is going to be female. Maybe a relative, or parent of one of the victims friends. Keeping with the 'teddybear picnic' juxtaposition of lively upbeat childhood movie while watching the thriller, we connected the reason for the attack to a repressed memory the antagonist has towards this girl from when she was younger. A tattered old toy bear is going to symbolical to the reason of her actions, how her
body is going to end up after the woman attacks h
er with the knife.
We created a new shot list and storyboard suggesting the new shots we need to organise to shoot. We have got a new actress, Louise Huntley, to be the antagonist, but we had a problem with the deadline and organizing a shoot. Because i
ts
a large last minute change, Jordan was unavailable to act, so we changed the victim to me so i can help and know exactly how we want the victim to act.
This is the brainstorm i created
This is the improved story board shots