Literature

These are some books we took out of the school library to influence out film trailer. We read through these books and took a couple of ideas from them.

Some books we took out of the school library to read for ideas on how to create a realistic plot.

Storyboard Part 2

Storyboard

Completed Storyboard



The Usual suspects

The usual suspects trailer

• Voice over tells the story
• The first sentence gives away the narrative of the film "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled, was convincing the world he didn't exist.
• The first two shots fade into one another
• The first shot shows fire, reflecting the danger that the audience will expect to see in the film. The fire is also started by a cigarette, and the audience will have assumptions that it was a man smoking the cigarette, and cigarettes are often linked to gangsters, therefore setting the genre of the film. This shot is repeated at the end for emphasis
• The second shot we are produced with is of some criminals in a line up and the audience now know who the main characters are.
•  Throughout the trailer there are frequent shots of violence and death, the audience then assume that the characters they were introduced to at the beginning of the trailer are responsible for these crimes.
• The audience is also introduced to an officer, we know this by him costume and the voice over.
• The audience is aware that the police are trying to find  the suspects from the begging and there is a sense of a race against time between the suspects and the police.
• It is also made clear that both the police and the suspects are looking for the same man who is thought to be very dangerous
• Prominent colours are red and blue
• Camera angles are mainly mid-shots and close-ups
• The lighting throughout the trailer is fairly low key.
• Theatrical trailer-gives away most of the plot but not the twist.
• Slow editing at the beginning, speeds near the middle, slows and speeds towards the end.
• Sound bridges - vocal

Shot Ideas

These are some images from films and tv programmes of shots we would like to use in our film trailer

Clocks

A clock would feature as one of the main props in our teaser trailer, and getting the right looking clock is crucial so we are looking at what clock would be appropriate, some of which we could use are below.
We and to use a repeated clock image to reflect the passing of time.

Storyboard and corresponding narrative

This is our first draught of our storyboard. We've drawn simple sketches and placed them in a rough order so we know approximately where each shot will appear.
Because this is a trailer many shots will be repeated throughout and it will not be until we are onto the post production editing stage that we will be able to finalise exactly where each shot will appear.                                     

Our final narrative idea is this:

• A policeman and his wife have a daughter who commits suicide due to severe bullying from school peers
• The wife seeks revenge on the bullies and kidnaps, tortures and eventually murders them.
• Her husband however is unaware of this, and he is one of the policeman investigating the case.
• The husband discovers halfway through that his wife is the murderer and covers up for her so that the other detective does not suspect her.
• However this lands him in trouble as he is suspected to be the person kidnapping these girls.

We're going to focus on the parts where the girls are being held captive and the detectives trying to track the murderer ( a la "The Silence of the Lambs"). (See previous blogs of locations etc.).

Natascha Kampusch

This is a story in the current news about a woman who was kidnapped.

• She was kidnapped off the street at the age of 10
• She was held hostage in a cellar
• When she hit puberty at the age of 12, her kidnapper (Priklopil) started to be physically, sexually and verbally abusive towards her.
• At the age of 12 he started to take her upstairs and make her clean the house.
• Priklopil didn't like it when Natascha cried, he would either cuddle her and try to make her stop crying whilst telling her how sorry he was, or he attempted to drown her, but not completely, so she was nearly unconscious.
• At the age of 14 she was made to sleep in his bed but not for a sexual reason, for the fact that he wanted someone to cuddle when he went to sleep.
• At the age of 15 she realised that Priklopil had a 1950's view of things and he believed that he should have a young housewife.
• He used to tell Natascha how fat and disgusting she was and she believed this was because he was anorexic and trying to push his anorexia on her.
• It was shortly after this that he cut the amount of food she was allowed to eat and she became drastically skinny, with her bones protruding through her skin.
• Priklopil was very paranoid about the police being able to track Natascha down by them finding one of her hairs, so he made her wear a plastic bag on her head until eventually she got her head shaved every time she was allowed upstairs to wash.
• After she became very skinny he forced her to work in the house half naked, and in the garden naked, knowing that she would never try to escape if she was naked and covered in bruises.
• He often held her outside the front door when she was naked and told her to try and run away, he didn't care that people may be able to see him because he knew that she would never run away without any clothes on
• To punish her he re-opened healing wounds
• After 2 years of being imprisoned she started to fight back but he was a lot bigger and stronger than her.
• She kept notebooks of the type of things that happened to her
• He had an intercom in her cellar
• She tried to kill herself when she was 14 by strangling herself with clothes
• At 15 she tried to slit her wrists with a large sewing needle.
• She also tried to kill herself by filling her lungs with smoke
• He occasionally took her out
• She was allowed to listen to the radio where she heard her name mentioned by the author of a missing persons book.
• Priklopil killed himself on the day that Natascha escaped
• She owns the house she was kept captive in
• She can see it from other peoples view and she shudders at the thought of what happened to her but it was her home for 8 years and she became used to that.
• She built an emotional relationship with him
• When she died she had to grieve for him because she felt she had lost someone close to her.
• She has a more acute awareness than women of her age
• She is lacking in aspects of her social skills
• She finds it hard to get close to people and from relationships with potential boyfriends. When she was locked in the cellar she craved human contact but now that she is out she is afraid of it.
•  Her father was an alcoholic and her parents had marriage problems.
• She as given literature in the cellar but has no knoledge of fashion or how young women her age should behave.
• 'You have to remember my mother lost her daughter. She had a child. She lost that child. She got the child back, but it was no longer a child, no longer someone she knew.'

• The chief police officer working on the case shot himself when people were challenging the police force for not doing enough to find Natascha.

• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1309370/Natascha-Kampusch-My-living-hell-dungeon.html

Locations...

Okay, so here are some potential locations!


This is part of the cellar that we might use to hold our kidnapped victims in. This location is claustrophobic, dark and full of cobwebs - making it even scarier for the kidnapped girls!

This is a desk that one of our detectives/police officers could use in the teaser trailer. This desk would be a good choice as it isn't just a basic table and chair!

Make up trials

These are make up trials of deceased bodies and scars/bruises using make up and then edited with different camera settings (e.g. sepia). For these photographs we used pale blue face paint and talcum powder.

These are also experimentations with editing the photographs on the computer after they have been taken. The top one is the one that I feel is the most effective as the small amount of colour makes it appear more realistic than the monochrome ones.

This was to see if we could effectively make a body part look as if it was detached from the rest of the body and then found in the shrubbery. 

After watching a Youtube video these were our first attempts at making scars.

In this photograph we were thinking about where to place scars on the body, and seeing how realistic facial scars would look.

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  These were make-up trials where we were trying to produce bigger scars and seeing how realistic they would look from different distances, however we are only planning to show our photographs for a few seconds so we do not havae to worry too much about this, as the audience will not have time to focus on the imperfections.