Search for Inspiration

Since the beginning, we have been inspired by a series of media texts to make our sequence. The first one came across when Myles was still thinking about potential ideas. He had watched, some time ago, a film called "Taken" —I'm sure you've heard of it—. There is a scene in which a young girl is hiding under her bed while some kidnappers search for her. She's on the phone but, apart from that, this section bears a lot of ressemblance with ours. The angle in which it is filmed, how the camera is positioned, the feelings that the threatened character experiences and the general storyline. 

Apart from this source of ideas, I have myself recycled many movies that I have watched in the past to make ours look compelling in my mind. I have thought of the film Rope (1948), which is filmed in non-stop continuity almost completely, with few cuts in the right moments which are almost impossible to notice. This contributes to the sense of tension because there is no space for the audience to rest and reflect properly. The images are thrown to them straight away, without pause, as it would occur in real life.

Hitchcock used mainly the character's dark coloured suits to cut from one sequence to the next one without being obvious. He placed a characterin front of the camerawho was supposedto be causally listening to a conversation or going somewhere. Within a few seconds, he would cut and start filming again with the pertinent changes.

We can probably use his technique at some point, especially thinking of our concerns about showing Callum's facial make-up in the beginning of the sequence. A simple moment of darkness due to a lightning problem in the hotel, or some character's body covering the frame as they are searching for something under the bed would be effective. In my opinion, the best moment to cut the scene would be when Ella is hiding under the bed. Even in the storyboard, I have decided to include a black frame when she gets in front ofthe camera and covers the light, a few seconds before she is placed behind of the lense and the camera starts acting like her own eyes.

For the drama that affects the couple when David falls to the floor and stares at Ella once he's dead, we have thought of conveying a similar psychological approach to what it happened some weeks ago during a terrorist attack.We saw in the news that a husband covered his wife's body in order to save her life. He got killed and the woman had to stay silent under his dead body for hours until the situation was over.