As a group, we decided to film on Sunday 7th March as this was when we were all available. We met at around 5 o'clock and waited for it to get dark so we were able to film our first few shots of our male character walking to the victims house. However when we went outside we found that it was too dark and we unable to see our character in the camera. We then moved to an alleyway where there were many street lights and we were able to see our character walking but there was a problem with our camera as it wasn't focusing on our character. We then decided to put our camera into night mode, however there was a 4 second lag and it made our filming look very poor. In the end we decided not to film the first few shots of our short film on that day and have made arrangements to film them on Tuesday 9th March. We have now successfully filmed our outside shots. We chose to shot at around 6:15 as it was light enough that we could see Fred walking to the house and it was also an acceptable darkness for us.
Changes:
As a group we decided to alter our bathroom scene. Originally, we had our killer, Fred, knock Katie out by hitting her on the head with the handle of the kitchen knife. However this proved to be too dangerous and ineffective. We had to consider the safety of our actress, therefore we decided that our killer would smother Katie with a flannel covered in the chemical chloroform. We achieved this easy and found it to be much less dangerous than the use of the kitchen knife.
The Stabbing: Our 'dummy' (below)
The stabbing is proving to be a difficult element to our short film. Our original idea was to make a cast of Jess' top half, using duc tape and then stuffing it with newspaper. We then taped a blood bag to the inside of the 'dummy' around the spot where we wanted Fred to stab Katie. We were then hoping that the stabbing would be smooth and look real, however this it did not. When stabbing the 'dummy' it just caved in and therefore did not look like a real body. We then tried to make the 'dummy' sturdier by adding cardboard and anything we could get our hands on to make it that little bit more sturdier. However, this did not work and therefore our attempt to show the stabbing of our victim, failed. Having this idea fail, meant that we needed to come up with a new idea as to how we would show the stabbing. We then watched some clips on YouTube to get an idea as to how stabbings are shown in films. We looked at the stabbing scene from Zodiac and The Strangers. Having looked at these we realised that we would never be able to achieve a stabbing scene like these films because we are on a zero budget and they have millions of pounds to use in order to achieve what they want. In the Zodiac clip they only show the man's facial expressions whilst he's being stabbed, however they do show the women actually being stabbed. We thought of a number of ways that they could've achieved this.
1: We thought that they could use a retractable knife to make it look like the knife was actually piercing the women when in fact it wasn't.
2: We thought that a dummy could've been used, however the women's face still shown, but the from the shoulders down, it would be a dummy, therefore the killer could stab the dummy and it would look real.
We then watched the stabbing scene from The Strangers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7MPIO0mrEQ (would not let us embed) and in this scene they do not actually show the victims being stabbed. They show the knife moving towards the stomach and then the knife touches the stomach but quickly cuts to show their facial expressions.
Written as a group.
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