LOOKING BACK AT MY PRELIMINARY TASK

…and how I felt about its progress to a full product

Introduction:

I drew the concept for my story from a film called “The Collector” which revolves around a thief breaking into a house, only to find the inside rigged with traps and the family of the home taken hostage and being tortured by a psychopathic serial killer. I felt that this was a compelling concept for my film.

Inspiration

I was influenced by a lot of old fashioned films of horror and suspense, mainly by Hitchcock. Stylistically, the films “Psycho” and “A Shadow of Doubt” had the greatest influence over me. I wanted the project to come off as unique by introducing an old-fashioned way of filmmaking to a contemporary audience.

The Pre-Production

For pre-production, I took location photos all over my house for where I planned to film the scenes from the script. I made various drafts of the script and storyboarded the entire story. I felt this made me feel prepared for the filming.

Production

I filmed it with my cousin and we did it all on one night. We improvised a lot of things and were lucky that it started raining, which we used greatly to add atmosphere, and used the car lights from my mom’s car to illuminate the rain when the Thief was entering the garage.

Post-production and Overall Impression

Editing was fairly improvised and had to cut down a lot of the footage which just drew out the film and made it boring. Looking back, I wished I had more footage. The thing I most regret about the entire thing was not renting a camera from the school, which have much better quality than the one I had.