Don't look now opening

During class, we decided to look at what is now known as "Britain's favorite thriller) Don't look now. Despite being a very old film being made back in 1973, there were some very powerful chords that the film struck and it allowed me to generate ideas for the thriller opening. 

It's use of the countryside as a backdrop was something in particular I took a note of. Due to its rural nature, the countryside is something that can be used quite effectively when viewing horror/thriller movies. I decided to take this into account as the area around our school depicts a lot of woodland like areas. The opening also displayed many mixed emotions throughout. There was always a sense of dread and fear throughout the opening as you feel very aware that something bad is going to happen to the main characters. I wanted to create this through our movie. We did this in a slightly different way using the old 1950s pop song as effective backdrops for feeling this dread. The movie also has some very effective images such as Donald Sutherland's character pulling the girl out of the lake. This also helped us generate character during the pre production stages of the movie. Whilst there are no children in the movie, the main female character has lost her husband, much like the parents losing their children in this movie. The opening was highly effective in teaching me in how to create atmosphere in a film opening and how it should immediately grab the audience in.

Original location planning

During the very early stages of production, we decided to find locations around Surrey and the UK that could possibly be abandoned. We found an area on the internet called Cane Hill Asylum which was fairly near where we lived. Due to the fact that the large majority of our movie opening was set in an insane asylum, we decided to have a look around the website to see if there was any way of getting in. Whilst we eventually discovered that the building had been completely demolished back in 2010, it was a very interesting way of discovering new locations on the internet as well as possible places to film, despite the lack of success of getting into the place.
Here are some images of the asylum to show what our original location planning was going to entail

Props

Over the course of filming, there were certain props that we needed in order to make the 1950s feeling for our movie seem authentic. For example, we needed a typewriter, a pack of cigarettes for the detective,an old vinyl record player and an old rotary telephone. Most of these props were only used for one particular scene which was the office scene  Some were fairly easy to find. For example , cigarettes were easy to find as adults could provide us them for the making of the movie in its entirety.  Others  were also fairly easy to find such as the record player and the rotary telephone as our teacher  had managed to provide these props for us.  The hardest prop to find was the typewriter. This was due to it being an extremely rare item to behold. Luckily, our teacher also managed to find this for us as well as she used a website to get a hold of a broken one so we could shoot the scene

Filming: tunnel sequence

For this scene, my character was filmed walking down a tunnel to get to the asylum. In order to create a better sense of atmosphere and dread, we decided to film a couple of POV shots in order to get a feeling like my character was being watched. We originally used a GoPro for this sequence but decided that the footage seemed too "shaky" making it hard to see. In the end, we decided to use the actual camera for this sequence instead but with no tripod. Also, we originally were going to do a POV from my perspective in order for the audience to understand what it was like in my shoes. However, we didn't think the footage looked particularly promising so we decided to change this part once again.

We used multiple shots for this sequence to make it seem far more threatening. We had a shot of me being watched from behind as well as one of me being watched from above. I thought this was an excellent idea due to the fact that it created a sense of dread. The way it's shot makes it the audience doesn't know whether I'm being watched by multiple figures or just by simply one that perhaps has some sort of supernatural background to it. 

Filming:office scene

This was perhaps the hardest to film sequence out of the entire movie. This scene required a lot of preparation in order for it to work. The main things that we had to do with the scene was to make it look authentic. It had to look very period based. As our school does look very old, it was good that there were certain rooms that still had an authentic feel. However, there were still certain things we had to do in order to make it even more so.
The first was the collection of props. As mentioned on a previous post, the majority of the props were largely for this scene alone. We prepared for this scene and managed to get all the props that we needed.

The room is also an office in real life where many important meetings happen in the school. As a result, we had to organize timings when we're able to do it. We also had to coincide  this with the times our actress could do as well. Once, we were able to solve and get a suitable time, then we were on our way.

During the actual filming, we  still had to make the scene look authentic as possible. This meant that we had to remove certain chairs and telephones that made the scene look too modern. We also had to frame the shot right so a tennis court would not be seen in the background as we thought that would be an unrealistic view for a private detective. The filming went smoothly and, whilst about 5 takes had to be done in order for it to be perfected, we generally felt it was a good shoot overall. We thought it helped deliver the effectiveness of the time period very well and that it was a great shoot in helping me learn how important authenticity is in a movie.

Construction: kidnapping scene

During this scene, the husband is finally kidnapped by his boss and dragged away. Originally, this scene was not in the script as, at first, we felt it would be more effective if the film didn't show the disappearance, as it would make it more mysterious due to the fact that it would be up the audience's imagination of what happened to him. Nevertheless, we decided to film a kidnapping sequence in order for the film to make a little more sense.

In this scene, the boss is shown ambushing the husband. A struggle happens before the husband is dragged away. We see a shot of his feet before we see him tied up to a chair screaming for help. 

We achieved the shot of him being kidnapped by filming the actor playing the husband in the tunnel. We included an "over the shoulder" shoot in order to show off the experience better. We then had the actor playing the boss come from around the corner, depicting a struggle. We tried to shoot it as realistically as possible in order for it to not look staged as we couldn't make the actors hit each other. We covered up a lot of the hitting and mainly focused on the husband getting dragged away.

The shot of his feet was achieved by having a closeup of the husband's feet. We then dragged him away but never filmed it so that it showed us. This was so we could have an effective shot of him being dragged but not actually showing where he was getting dragged to, perhaps letting the audience be more in the husband's shoes of being unsure of where he's getting taken to. 

Finally, the scene with him being tied up was achieved in a number of different ways. We found a new location behind a shed in the woods near our school. We tied a simple knot to give the effectiveness of him being in an enclosed space and put a blindfold on him to give a more realistic edge to him being kidnapped.

Character shoots

We decided to shoot pictures of our characters. These images will possibly be used in the promotional distribution for our movie when it comes out. We also used to get ourselves an idea of what the visual representation of many of these characters are going to be. We took pictures of two of the characters. One being the private detective portrayed by me and the other being a government boss like character played by Marcus Couling.