Fia Brown Candidate number: 1804
Claremont Fan Court School: 64680
My production team:
Tallulah Duffy (1823) and Laura Souter (1860)
My brief: The title of our film is "Cynic". It is about two teenage friends finding the main characters' sisters' spirit through the Oujia Board. However, that is what first killed the sister. The protagonist decides to play with the board and discovers a spirt whom she thought was her sister but instead was an evil spirit.
I play the role of the deceased sister who comes back as an evil spirit and torments the protagonist. My other roles included editing and filming videos to set the scene/ location. I was also in charge of behind the scene pictures and videos.
Filming as a Production Team of three people was a huge challenge during lockdowns as we could not get together to film. This meant that we communicated online a lot over Facetime and Google Meet to allocate bits of filming then tried to edit them together.We also couldn't use the locations that we had originally hoped for. One example was the use of a car. We tried to overcome the impossibility of location shooting by adding sound tracks of atmospheric sound. For example, when the camera appears to pan across the woods, we added a track that connotes mystery and fear. Although we managed an initial shoot in a graveyard, in the editing process we realised that the wind had seriously impaired the sound quality. This scene with several edits definitely needed a cleaner sound quality.
I was very pleased with the choice of mise-en-scene of the graveyard: it is a beautiful, rustic and atmospheric venue with a winding path that allows our heroine to walk through it, building interest.
On reflection, I was also very pleased with the location, casting and mise-en-scene of the bedroom scene. With its compact size, white and pink colours and range of soft toys, we created the perfect setting to connote an exchange of intimate confidences. Getting inside the mind of a teenage girl was one of our main objectives: we took the risk of being experimental by putting text on screen with the words in the girl’s mind, a bit like a video diary. I am really pleased by the framing of the shot in which the audience are allowed to see that the girl is being observed: this creates suspense and deepens a brooding sense of impending doom.
