Production

Behind the process of filming

Making the conspiracy board

To start I had to work out the key points that I wished to include: I wanted the murderer's face in the center for the big reveal with different detail surrounding her relating to the key points of the case.

Firstly I made the conspiracy board using a a sheet of cardboard as my base. From there I printed out the relevant photos and made them big to signify their importance. Addtionally I gathered bits of physical objects to add extra 'evidence' that served to mak the board feel more full and interesting. Finally, I added sticky notes with writing on it to explain the detective's thought process.

Conspiracy Board result

Sticky notes - I deliberately made the handwriting messy and frantic as a way to portray the personality of the detective, chaotic and unsettling to the average person.

Pictures - Each picture displays a core piece of the puzzle. The blue hoodie: Represents what the killer was wearing during the attack. Picture of house: shows the location of the crime.

DNA sample - The red bloodlike substance aids the horror feeling of my piece as it is physical evidence of the crime that has been committed.

Pills - Unlike in other horror films, the pills themselves are the weapon, something to seemingly small and harmless is extremely deadly. I tried to link this together with a few photos to link the pills and posion contained together.

Lighting

I played around with the lighting in certain shots. I wanted the scenes with the detective to feel adjacent to the stereotypical artificial lighting, almost as if she was interrogating someone.

Set

This is the shot of the scene at the desk before we removed the extra clutter that would break the immersion of the space.

As you can see from the image, there is a lot of miscellaneous school books that had to be removed for the final cut, as well as the blanket on the chair and other elements like the sign.

However, other elements of clutter like paper and and several knick nacks were suitable to keep, as the detective's personality comes across as a bit crazed. So naturally an audience would expect the set up to be a bit messy.

I made sure to clear out the front of the desk, to place emphasis on the laptop so that it would draw the audience's focus and attnetion the most and the clutter in the background would be less distracting.

Summary

Successes

I managed to capture any interesting shots with no major difficulties. I was particularly apt at controlling my environment to avoid continuity errors as well as getting excess footage preemptively so that I wouldn't have to go back to get more footage.

Challenges

One of my biggest difficulties relates to my main filming location, as I filmed it when I was abroad. This meant that I knew I couldn't reshoot anything from this location nor did I have a tripod to stabilize the footage.

To Change

If I could change anything, I would have brought a tripod to my location abroad so that the footage could be stable. As it stands, there is nothing from the local filming location that I feel needs reshooting.