Tuesday 9th Feb

On tuesday 9th feb we spent the day looking at how to improve our coursework. The first thing we questioned was "is it cliché?". Our piece incompasses a lot of woods/a girl tied up/flashbacks of being dragged - this would suggest the answer is yes.
We talked over many new ideas on how to change the focus of the story to something more originally. We discussed the new edited rough-cut, and noticed that the flashbacks weren't obvious enough making the flow of the images unclear. and also the flash backs jumped from very different stages into her downfall which to an audience may be very confusing. We thought the slow continuous pace was effective, but but turns out, the 45second introduction of setting the wood scene is just a bit too long... so we decided to cut it to just two or three 5second fades.
we found that we had too many close ups of the hands and gagged mouth meant the had to get rid of a few shots. We thought about more flashbacks following the story of how she got there more, but decided they weren't effective enough and therefore removed several of these. This left us with VERY little, and were forced to come up with a better idea.
The fact that our movie was beginning to become a Psychological Thriller, which restricts the amount of styles filming we achieved. We talked about combining two genres, 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 antagonist to the victim from their point of views.
It started to look like we were changing our whole original idea so we then tried thinking of which shots we have already filmed 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 even more cliché, the antagonist is going to be female. Maybe a relative, or parent of one of the victims friends. In conjucntion 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 her with the knife.
We then 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 of the last minute change, Jordan was unavailable to act, so we changed the victim to lauren, in our group, this is also good because she knows exactly how we want the character to be.