ELLA: average young girl on holiday with her boyfriend. Eager backpacker and engaged college student. Adjectives to describe her would be innocent, feminine, witty and hesitant. Regarding her appearence, she is about 1.65 in height and has regular weight. She would be considered attractive by most. Shoulder-lenght hair and expressive eyes. 18-21 years old.
DAVID: average college student. He is responsible, mature, serious, shy and has been dragged to the backpacking holidays by Ella, though he is not regretting it. He is madly in love with her. He's not too tall, average weight and average-length hair. 18-21 years old.
EXTREMISTS 1 & 2: two Siberians who form part of a clandestine organisation. Not too bright, confident, racist and disrespectful. Their purpose is to carry out a mass murder in the backpackers hotel where Ella and David are spending the night as a protest against the Western world. 25-30 years old.
After having considered boaring houses such as Ewhurst, which has convincing rooms, or Cornhill, which used to be a hotel, the preferred location for our sequence is the Studio, an option recommended by Matt. He said that it would be perfectly feasable to recreate a hostel room with some parquet flooring that is available and some wooden strips to assemble the bed. The cupboard and chair are easy to find around, and the rest is a matter of creativity. The walls and door could also be constructed on set as it has already been done for previous works.
To have the room —our only setting— more clear in our minds and, most importantly, to make it evident also for the people who can actually turn it into reality in the school, I drew the space with all the pertinent details and included some descriptions.
Luke and Matt have come to class to check the estate of our ideas and what is needed from them, thinking ahead about the day of the shoot after Christmas. We did an outline of the story line once more, making sure that Luke, who has never heard of us before, was aware of the technical part. As a group, we also tried to sell the idea so they would find it easier to collaborate and put more effort into it as organisers.
In the beginning, they were a bit unsure about the attractiveness of having only one continuous shot, though they also saw its creative appeal. They suggested that we did some panning around the room from time to time. However, eventually they asked for some graphic support and I provided them with my works, this is, my setting design and what I have from the storyboard so far. Their response made me feel extremely proud because they immediately changed their mind about our project and started truly liking it: apparently, they could now picture it perfectly thanks to me.
Once we had convinced them, we showed them a list of the details we need for a realistic setting. They have everything that we've thought about in the Studio already, except for a cupboard. Nevertheless, Katie heard that we were having trouble with that detail and went out to ask Mike and Adam, an action after which everything is sorted. We should be almost ready to shoot by now.
As we've been using his room as a workplace because we were in a more advanced stage than most of the other groups, he has taken an active part in some points and has witnessed most of the changes in the storyline. This is the reason why, when he heard the new approach that we were going for encouraged by Matt, he intervened. He personally defended the idea that we had before and insisted on us rephrasing it to Matt more clearly so he would embrace it.
It is true that a sizeable part of the tension would be gone if we followed Matt's instructions. If the idea was that the murderers were specifically looking for our protagonists, they would be silent as they approached their room. As a result, the tense period of them hearing noises and wondering what they implied, as well as the sense of danger, would disappear.
Adding to this, Mike said that the result would be far more dramatic if the loving couple has accidentally come across this situation, with no clue of what is bound to happen.
As a group, we agreed fully with him and decided to make a step-by-step plan to have everything certain in our minds.
Today we have gone up to the Editing Suite to check out the weapons that they have for our terrorists. We found the ones underneath. However, Mike happened to be there and told us that they were not really the right ones for us to use. These ones are a model that is too associated with Western culture, while the AK-47, which they have in the Theatre Department, is perfect and more widely extended. It would be more convincing for our Siberians to have it because it is free of specific implications. Furthermore, Mike mantains that it looks more professional and its materials are of better quality. The model which we decided to avoid is shown underneath.
Mike argued that the AK-47 are more common to see and convey a much more convincing aesthetic, which looks much more real than the other guns. There is only one in the Theatre Department apparently, but the truth is that it could work for us because we only need to show the gun that the extremist who kills the protagonist is carrying, thanks to our decision of a low camera angle.
Myles emailed Elisabeth to get further information from the Theatre crew and see if it would be fine for them to lend us the model that we would need. However, she told us to email Al, as he's the one in charge of those issues.
Al replied pretty soon positively so we are good in this aspect. We will probably get hold of the AK-47 and a pistol just in case we want to show something else on the frame.
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.
After so much time and effort, I have finished our storyboard. It was tricky to do it because most of our sequence is going to be filmed continuously, so there weren't any real changes in angle or major movements. However, I think that I did a clear account of everything that we want to show and how we want to show it overall. I have tried to include many details of the set design, as well as the most relevant actors' changes of position. The storyboard also made me reflect on issues like lighting; Luke maintains that we should have a window somewhere in the set to give more clues to the audience about where is the action taking place. The glowy reflection of the snow in the parquet flooring would certainly be effective.
I am certainly satisfied with the work I have done, especially because I haven't had any actual help and it was my first complete storyboard to plan and illustrate. See it for yourselves!
