Character Analysis

Main Character

Suzie is 25 and she lives in a small town in the country. She is an ordinary girl with an ordinary life. She's a receptionist. She has lived a sheltered life and the situation brought upon her sends her over the edge. She is paranoid and edgy.

Villain

The villain remains nameless and mysterious and he does not reveal his identity until the very end. He is very manipulative and clever. The way he's presented shows that he thinks his plan through in great detail.

The villains first victim

Amber is about 35 and appears very similar to Suzie, which shows that the villain picks his targets carefully; weak and easily lead. However when Suzie and Amber finally meet we see that Amber is fragile and destined for revenge.

Plot Outline

Title: The Sinful Victim
Tagline: Innocence is Lost
Genre: Thriller

A girl receives a letter from an anonymous person telling her to kill somebody, otherwise her loved ones will be at risk of being murdered. She does as the letter says and contacts the number that was written on the letter. She tells the anonymous person that she has done as asked and he tells her that another letter is on it's way, she says she thought it was a one off but he hangs up. A letter arrives a week later but this time it's someone she knows. She hears on the news a similar story and assumes its the same person so decides to visit the murderer in prison. She confesses to this woman and they realise they have done the same thing; the woman tells her she knows who the sender is, and informs her of the address. The original woman is unsure whether to continue the search, but in the end finds him and confronts him resulting in her attempting to set up the villain. Will she succeed?

Influences and Inspirations

Why we chose the genre thriller?


We chose the genre thriller as we have both watched a lot of thriller films and we really liked the tension that these films create. We both decided that this genre would work well as we have previously discussed the codes and conventions of this genre and thought that we knew it enough to use thriller. The films listed below are our inspiration as in our film we have twists, unexpected events and lots of dark things will occur as does the following...



Shutter Island


Shutter Island is about a U.S marshall called Teddy Daniels who has come to Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a murderer. She has escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane and is thought to be hiding nearby. Little did he know that some of his past will be revealed and painful memories will be remembered.




Black Swan



A ballet dancer wins her dream, the lead in 'Swan Lake' however she is perfect as the role of the innocent White Swan but cannot seem to get to grips with the Black Swan. Until she begins to slowly lose her mind and lose control of herself and reality, she then begins to become more like the Black Swan. 

Valkyrie

Valkyrie is set in Nazi Germany during WW2, German officers, and generals take matters into their own hands as they forsee the loss of the war while Hitler is in charge. Along with some accomplisses Colonel Claus von Satuffenberg, devises a plan: operation Valkyrie in which, their mission is to kill their leader: Hitler.





Phonebooth

Stuart Shepard finds himself trapped in a phone booth, pinned down by an extortionist's sniper rifle.
We think that Phonebooth is our biggest inspiration as in the film he is trapped by somebody who is out to kill him, however he does not know who the killer is. In our film we also have a mysterious killer who sends letters to people to get them to do their dirty deeds, but he is also unknown.

Our Evaluation

Evaluation – Preliminary Task

For our media preliminary task we had to create a short film using different shot types, and angles. We had a choice of three different scripts, and we chose the second one starting with the mobile phone conversation. We chose this one because we thought it would interest and intrigue the audience more than the other two. We had to include specific types of angles which were an action shot and an over the shoulder shot obeying the 180° rule. We decided to use Windows Live Movie Maker as opposed to iMovie on the Apple Macs, as we had more skill using that software.

Firstly, we storyboarded ten shots of our film, in which we tried to vary our shot types in order to show our understanding and capability. However during the filming process, we found that some of the shots did not fit the genre of our preliminary film. We established that the script was part of the drama genre therefore we needed a close up at the end instead of an over the shoulder shot, which we originally storyboarded. Next we had to choose our actors and agree on a time and place to meet. We thought carefully about which actors would respond well to our directions as we were aware of our time limit.

The opening shot was a medium close up of the mobile phone, which then zoomed in to a blurred close up, when it started ringing. This was to make the audience intrigued about who and why the phone rang. The camera then panned to a medium close up of the actress who answered the phone. This established the main character, and gave the audience the feeling that something was not right. The camera then panned as the actress put down the phone and then left the room – our action shot. We decided not to use any cuts up until then so it would appear a smooth transition, creating a normal everyday type atmosphere. The next step in the action shot, viewing the actress from the front, edited through a fade, this was because when we tried it with a straight cut it jumped and didn’t seem to flow.

As the actress sat down on the sofa the camera panned into a two-shot where she was sat with another actress and started their conversation. We chose a two-shot to introduce our second character to the audience. The two-shot lasted around 2 seconds and then cut to our over the shoulder shots. We had to make sure that when filming our over the shoulder shots we kept both eye levels the same, as this is very important much like the 180° rule. Our final shot was a close up; this was to show the actors expression.

Throughout the task we have learnt that using a tripod made our shots look more professional as the panning was smoother and the shots did not look as shaky as they would have without a tripod. We also found that the filming took a lot longer than anticipated and it was more difficult as we had to film the shots several times to get the best angles. The main thing we thought went well was our filming as, although time was an issue, we included different shot types.

Our main difficulty was that we couldn’t edit out background noise that interfered with our filming and also we found that the interference from the mobile phone we were filming was an issue. However we managed to solve this issue by editing out the sound and importing a non-diegetic sound of a telephone ringing.

If we had the chance to re-do our preliminary film, we would try and familiarise ourselves with the Mac software, iMovie, as there may have been a way to get rid of the background noise and the sound of the camera clicking on and off.

Overall we were pleased with our film as this was our first attempt at filming and editing a video and also our knowledge of shot types and angles was helpful. Although we came across some difficulties, we have now learnt how to prevent this and we think that when we film our actual assessment, our skills would have improved a great deal.

Our preliminary task