Character Profile - Mother

The Mother, Carrie, is played by Annie who was a friend of Lily's. She is an experienced Actress which was important to us as the character needed to portray strong, convincing emotions due to the loss of her child.

Character Profile - Step-Dad

Meet Thomas Cutler, the step-dad to our protagonist Esther.

We cast Michael Curran, Nick's dad which meant it was much easier for us to contact him for filming.

We have created a back story surrounding this character which involves him meeting his wife Carrie at his job at Lazarus Packaging in early 2008. He is a stay at home dad and has become a close father figure to Esther.

We dressed him in every day clothing to portray normality and kept colours muted/in fitting with our colour motif of blue. The darker colours hinted toward connotations of darkness, mystery and danger which we wanted to keep subtle as it may hint towards a twist in the storyline.

Character Profile - Esther

CHILD, FEMALE, 10 YEARS OLD

Played by Esther Payne

Here is our main character, the young girl. She is aged 10 and is played by Esther who is also 10 years of age.

In our trailer she wears everyday clothing such as jeans and converse (as above) which is what she wears when kidnapped. 

We kept her costumes in keeping with our colour scheme of blue as we wanted blue to have significance in relation to her character. We wanted her room and costume to be part of this colour motif so that when she is missing blue stands for character. 

Click here to see why we chose to use blue

Character Profile - Kidnapper

KIDNAPPER 1, MALE, LATE 20s

Played by Nick Curran

The role of the kidnapper is played by a member of our group, Nick Curran.

We cast him as being a part of our group he was always present in our filming sessions anyway. 

His costume is all black clothing with a balaclava to fit the conventions of a stereotypical kidnapper, conforming to the audience's expectations of a violent figure.

Esther's Bedroom

These are the photos of Esther's bedroom which we chose for its blue decor. We filled the room with other blue items so that is was in keeping with our chosen colour motif of blue.

Filming Session 3 - Plan

Our upcoming filming session is our most significant so far as it is our first filming session with the Mum, Annie, the Step-Dad, Mick, and the Child, Esther. As our only booked session with every character we wanted to ensure it ran a smoothly as possible, so set out the following basic schedule for the day. 

11.00-11.20: Arrive at the location and get set up
                         Ensure camera's are charged
                         Check locations are set up how we want them
                         Discuss our plans for the day

11.20-12.00: Shots with Esther on her own - Filmed with Go-Pro
                         Sounds of Esther being taken 
                         The beginning shots with Esther's hands 
                         Shots of her around the house 
                                      Playing on trampoline
                                      Reading 
                                      Doing crafts that are in her room

12.00-12.20: Annie Arrives 
                          Greet Annie and explain the plans for the day 
                          Take photos of the family, and individual actors for the blog 

12.20-13.00: The shots of the whole family 
                          Esther playing as the parents look happy 
                          The parents arguing without Esther 
                          Record sound of parents arguing

13.00-13.30: Contingency Time 
                          Re-film anything we don't like
                          Catch up on time
                          Esther can leave
                          Group break

13.30-14.00: Shots of Mum
                          Filming from behind her, typing and working
                          Take photo's of location for Blog

14.00-15.00: Shots of Parents 
                          Scene with Hot Drink, Step-Dad taking it into Mum, shaking and nervous

15.00-15.30: Final shot of parents
                           Walking into the bedroom of the child
                           Tracking shot

15.30-16.00: Contingency Time 

Scripting Part 2

For one of the shots in our trailer the parents are in their car and a radio-broadcast announcing their child's disappearance comes on the radio. 

We used our actress who played the Mum to also play the voice of the broadcaster.

We tried to base our script on other news broadcasts. In our research we made a note of the basic information included.

The announcement states:

News just in a 10 year old girl has gone missing from her home in the South of England. Officers responded to a call from her mother yesterday, and are currently investigating the circumstances surrounding her disappearance. A spokesperson for the police said that the case was being treated as suspicious.

Bridge Scene

Below you can find pictures of our second filming session. After finding our location we tried a selection of shots with our two actors Nick and Mick. 

Storyboard Animatic

Green Preview Titles

After extensive viewing of trailers we noticed a recurring theme is the use of a green preview screen displaying the text 'THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR APPROPRIATE AUDIENCES' with some variation i.e. sometimes it reads 'ALL AUDIENCES'.

Since we know our film will be of a higher rating we knew we would want to use the screen that reads 'FOR APPROPRIATE AUDIENCES'.

We wanted everything within our trailer to be created completely from scratch so I decided to create our own green preview title to also achieve a high quality whilst avoiding copyright infringements.

This was easily created using powerpoint, as the screen is simply a dark green colour with white sans serif capitalised font with two lower case links at the bottom of the screen.




Original:

Ours:

Titles in Trailers

From research we have found that the film title comes towards the end, sometimes last in the order of the titles, and the film production's name and/or logo comes usually first.

Tester Shots 1

Final Logo Creation

We created our final logo using iMovie in which we created three photos with different contrast, brightness and colour hues, fading between each and added a lens flare. During the lens flare we blended a thunder-roll sound effect.