Our new actress

Georgia Gerstein

We hope to use Georgia Gerstein as the actress in our new finalised version of our opening sequence. She received an A* in GCSE drama, has+ gone on to study it at AS level, and has experience playing the part of a wild, 'off-the-rails' party girl for a piece she did for her AS examination . Furthermore, she fits the requirements of the 'look' we want to create for our main character, and says she would be free and willing to shoot whenever we need her.

Key signifiers of a rapist

  

We wanted to show that rape isn't just about sex, or about passion or enjoyment for the rapist. It's often violent, abusive, demoralising and brutal, and victims are left not only emotionally but physically scarred by the experience. Victims take years and years to overcome the experience, and some never do. It's far more then just sex being forced upon someone. It's hard to define a 'stereotype' of a rapist - obviously we all automatically think of a hooded youth hanging around in a park to pounce, but really they can't be generalised so easily, and are people driven to rape by all different sorts of experiences - abusive childhoods, drink and drugs problems, and so on. The only stereotype or 'key signifier' i could think of personally of a rapist was that they may wear a balaclava or hoodie to conceal their identity.

Re-thinking Our Idea

Our old idea was too complicated and didn't work nearly as effectively as we'd hoped, so our group decided to really simplify the idea - we noticed that the shots that we'd kept straightforward and simple were the most effective anyway. After discussing our new ideas with each other, our actors, and our teachers, here is the new idea we put together:

• A video diary style opening, involving the rape victim talking to the camera about her experience.
• The first 20-30 seconds will just be a CU of her talking directly to the audience.
• Fade to black, before a 'flash-back'.
• Flashback will include her walking up the path, smoking a cigarette, receiving a text and so on.
• She enters her flat, and as in our test shoot, will be attacked by the rapist from behind.
• Fade to black, and time flashes forward
• The last 20-30 is her talkign directly to the audience once again about her fears etc.

Background information:
The rest of the movie would be about her coming to terms with overcoming the rape.
The rapist is a 'serial rapist' who has a history of raping many other women, and leaving a trade mark 'calling card', disguised as a funeral directors business card, hinting that his victims will in turn be murdered.
She has the made this video-diary as evidence to provide the police with, but is in hiding, from her rapist.

The Test Shoot

This is a clip of the part of our opening sequence we liked the most.





The test shoot opened our eyes to a lot of things we need to do differently in the actual shoot, for which reason we're all relieved we had this oppurtunity to trial-and-error our ideas. There are however some things that went really well and that we're pleased with.


Things that went well:

• All actors and members of the group showed up
• We managed to shoot everything we had planned to
• The weather was good
• All equipment was brought
• Location was perfect for what we wanted to shoot
• There were no arguments, everyone got along well

Things that didn't go well:

• Some lighting issues - There was continuity problems with whether we had the lights on/off. There was also some problems with glare when we filmed outside.
• The effect we were trying to create with the flashbacks from the therapist room just didn't go as well as we thought it would, for which reason we have decided to rethink how we go about our idea.
• Some continuity errors
• Forgot some props, eg. high heels, glasses for the therapist
• Cannot use swearing.

key signifiers or stereotypes of a typical 'off-the-rails' party girl

short skirts

fishnet tights

red lipstick

high heels

smokes excessively

drinks excsessively

takes drugs

stays out till early hours of morning

goes clubbing

has lots of sex/boyfriends

Final Idea

We decided unanimously at our first group meeting that the genre of our opening sequence should be 'horror/thriller', and decided on the following final idea:

• a rape scene, committed at the girl's house.
• the girl is aged around 18, and lives in her own flat.
• she has had a difficult, troubled childhood, and turned to drink, drugs, partying, and sex as a form of escape.
• because of what she has been through, she has been in and out of therapy from a young age.
• one night, after a particularly heavy night's drinking, she is followed home, and brutally shoved through the door to her flat and raped there.
• the emphasis would be on the fact that the rape is very physical, violent, aggressive, and angry as oppose to sexual or passionate in anyway.
• the story will however, be told through a series of flashbacks, as the girl tells the story to her therapist.
• there will be some kind of hinting or insinuation that her therapist is in fact her rapist (we thought this would be a clever play on the word 'therapist' breaking down into 'the rapist'). The therapist will maybe suggest to her that it is down to her provocative style of dress and loud, drunken behaviour.

Initial Idea

Despite the opening sequence being open to any kind of genre we liked, I decided to focus my initial idea on the genre of 'thriller/horror', because it meant I could gain inspiration from looking through past projects on YouTube. I started playing around with the idea of drinks being spiked at a party/date-rape drugs and formed the following suggestion to put forward to my group:


Clip showing a teenaged girl, aged between 6 and 18 at a house party. Camera follows her movement around as she socializes, drinking shots, etc., and the picture steadily becomes blurrier as she gets drunker. The 'blurry vision' effect of the camera then starts being cut-up with clearer shots of a guy sitting next to her, spiking her drink as she gets up to sort her skirt out. Suddenly the pace speeds up and there is fast-paced, choppy CU cuts of him forcing her into a bedroom, forcefully pushing her up against the wall, etc. insinuating the build up to a rape.