Directorial statement

For my casting, we were told by Simon to use either Mandy.com or Starnow to find our cast for the project. I decided to use Mandy.com as it gave us the option to find actors who were more professional. After I posted my ‘job’ on Mandy, I received an audition for the role of ‘Baby-Doll’ and I accepted her straight away as I was worried about not receiving enough auditions for the roles.  For my other roles, two other actors from Mandy applies for my remake, but unfortunately, a few days before filming began, I received an email from my male actor who was originally planning on coming back to London that morning from Italy (he lived in London, but was in Italy at the time for a job), who said that he would no longer be able to make the date due to taking a paid job that morning. Luckily for me, one of my old friends from secondary school was free for that day and was also interested in the shoot as it benefited his photography course. My other female actress (the second to apply) emailed me the morning of the shoot to say that she had fallen ill overnight and would no longer be able to make the shoot. Luckily, my crewmate, Sydney, was able to step in to play the other female killer. Another old school friend filled in for the main role and my dad stepped in to play the male killer. For casting, I wasn’t too fussed about appearance in comparison to the film as we weren’t being marked on that.

I knew right away for my scene remake that I needed a house to film in. Unfortunately, my kitchen and living area were not suited for the remake as, not only was my kitchen too small, my living room was also completely made up of carpet, which wouldn’t mix well with the amount of fake blood we would have to use in the film. So, I spoke to my granddad, whose kitchen was more than good enough for filming in as it was very spacious and the floor would be okay for all of the fake blood we had to use. He agreed very quickly to let me use his house to film in, I also got his permission through email, later on, to help with proof for this blog that I went through the right stages to begin filming. All filming was done inside of the house, with only the kitchen, hallway and spare bedroom begin used for filming.

For costumes, decided to let the cast choose their outfits to be similar in a sense to their characters. For example, Alexandra’s (the lady who played Baby Doll) costume outline was just a shirt, a bomber jacket, and jeans. I didn’t get into detailed specifics for anyone, as, again, I was more focused on directing as that is what we are being marked on. I just gave a general outline to my cast, and let them choose their outfits for filming.  Special effects/makeup/general makeup, the only makeup we needed was the fake blood begin used on both Katie and Jacks' characters. For the fake blood, I confirmed to my cast that the fake blood was very easy to wash out and wouldn’t stain clothing. I also asked both Katie and Jack to bring a spare set of clothes with them to change into after filming so they wouldn’t have to be covered in fake blood when they went home.

When it came to the set design, for the first section of the scene that took place at night, we covered all the windows in the kitchen with blackout plastic to give the illusion of us filming at night, even though it was during the day. We then removed the table cloth and made it bare, only putting a few kitchen items and an empty ice cream pot on the table as that was the closest we could get to from the scene we had in the film. For our second scene, we place the kitchen table on its side and then two chairs in the center of the room. We also remembered to take off all of the plastic sheets so daylight could come in.

For sound design, we were told it was a huge part of making our project come to life, after all, even if your film is stunning in terms of graphics, poor sound design can turn people away. After reviewing my first edit, Simon told me to possibly add some ambient background music to increase the tension as well as adding in some sound effects to push the realism of the scene forward. I also asked Simon if we could use the soundtrack from the actual film in our remake, he said yes, so, I went onto Youtube and found the soundtrack piece that matched the scene, and then downloaded it before adding it into the scene. For the sound effects, I added in the sound of someone pounding on a glass window to add into the scene where Kati was hitting the window, I needed to add in the sound effect in post-production as Katie didn’t hit the window too hard, for fear of breaking or damaging it. I also found the sound effect of a knife stab (which was just the sound of a knife stabbing a cabbage (which somehow sounds like flesh being torn?). For a lot of the scene, I used the sounds within the recording – footsteps, door slams, locking the door. It gave a sense of realism into the scene as it wasn’t just a case of me adding in all sound effects into the scene in post.

For shooting, I decided to stick with mostly close-up’s and medium shots. However, we did change several shots in order to accommodate our location. One example – and my personal favorite shot of the scene, was the tracking shot we did when Katie’s character ran from the kitchen, stopped just before running into Pin-up Girl and then running up the stairs into the bedroom. We didn’t initially plan to shoot it like that, but after choosing to change location as to where Katie’s character was going to run into. I planned to have her run into the living room as it was only the same floor (like the scene in the film), however, we all thought it would make more sense to have her run into the bedroom like in the film, even though in my granddad’s house, the bedroom was upstairs.

Another scene we decided to change was how we filmed Katie’s character being knocked out by the male stranger. For this, I originally planned to have it as a reverse shot of Katie and showing the killer behind her. However, after realising we wouldn’t be able to because of the distance between her and the bedroom door, we decided to have a long shot of the hallway as she stepped out into the hallway, where the masked killer appeared from the other room and Katie fell back, allowing us to give the illusion of her being struck.

Throughout editing, everything came together very nicely, especially after adding in the sound effects and music. The major thing I decided to do was color correction – something I have never touched in my whole 8 years of editing experience. For my correction, I decided to add a filter to the ‘night’ scenes, which gave it a very dark and red effect, highlighting to the audience that this scene is very dangerous and scary – something I really wanted to get across in the scene. I also tried it with the morning scene, but because we had the lights turned on during filming, instead of just letting the natural light in, the filter didn’t really add to the effect of the scene and only had the scene more yellow, so I decided to remove the filter for that section and kept it the same.

For my own personal editing style, I decided to make some of the shots linger on the characters to show their performance as well making the audience feel like they are actually in the scene, an example of this is the tracking shot we did with Katie as it feels like you are trying to run away with her, after all, who wants to be stuck in a three with two people who have the intent to mess with you before murdering you.