Costume decisions: HANNAH

To help decide upon the costumes of our characters I decided to look at other various openings to films of the thriller genre in order to get a further idea of generally the kind of colours/style of clothing that characters wear in the openings.

After looking a few openings including 'The girl with the dragon tattoo', 'Usual Suspects' and 'Inception', I came to the conclusion that most thriller openings featured characters dressed in dark, plain clothing. I think that this is to draw attention towards the storyline and the character's actions rather than what they're wearing. Because of this, I have decided that both the male and female character will be wearing dark jeans and non eye-catching dark tops/hoodies.

I already had the idea that I wanted the female character to look like she hadn't changed in a few days and so her clothes would be dirty and torn to imply that the man had sexually attacked her. This would also imply to the audience that she had been running and hiding for a while now.
I also wanted the girls body and clothes to be covered in blood. However it is vital that the blood appears realistic as if the blood looks fake it could ruin the nature of the opening. So I went on to research several different substances which can be made to resemble realistic blood:

This is a screenshot from one of the websites I looked at giving instructions on how to make realistic fake blood

However in the end after researching several different methods I decided to purchase a pre-made tube of fake blood as it seemed the most reliable/effective method.

This is a video of me showing how to apply fake blood:

I then went on to research how fake blood had been used in thrillers featuring chase scenes as I thought this could be a useful basis for our opening. Firstly I looked at a chase scene from the film 'Shutter Island' which is known for it's high tension and interesting plot twists whilst incorporating a horror element into the plot line.

Throughout the chase scene in 'Shutter island', varying lighting is used to emphasise certain aspects of the frame. One particular shot which stood out to me was a low angle shot of the 'chaser' showing only his blood-covered foot. This was very suspenseful as it puts questions in the audience's minds and by combining this with quick cuts to different shots and varied lighting, the whole scene was very tense.

To further research my costume choices, I again wanted to research chase sequences from thrillers. I looked at a sequence from an episode of BBC's 'Luther'. The chase scene again uses quick cuts to convey a tense atmosphere. The characters are both dressed in dark clothing which  makes it unclear as to who the protagonist of the situation is. 

This helped me to make the decision to dress the female character in my opening in a white top to convey innocence and purity. The white will create a contrast to the red blood splatters which connote ideas of death and danger. I have chosen to dress her in tights as they're easy to give a 'distressed' look to by laddering and ripping and so I thought this would be an effective costume choice to demonstrate the attack which the female suffered. In the flashback scene the female will be wearing a skirt, however in the present-day scenes she will only be wearing the ripped tights. This gives the subtle impression of a sexual attack.

I chose to dress the male character in a generic black hoodie to give 'thuggish' connotations to the audience. Using the colour black will give the audience a clear indication of who is the 'good' person in the situation and who is the 'bad', as the female character will be wearing white. The male character will be wearing dark jeans so as not to stand out from the background/setting and give the appearance of a dark silhouette.

POST FILMING

When filming our thriller opening, we encountered a problem with the pre-made fake blood that I had chosen to use. In certain areas I had applied the 'blood' liberally, using a body makeup sponge (as shown in the picture below). About an hour into filming, the areas in which I had used a lot of blood began to crack and peel. To rectify the situation, we had a break from filming and I had to reapply the fake blood in the exact same place as before, however this time so as not to repeat the problem I used less of the product.

Another problem with one of my costume decisions was the the white T-shirt to be worn over tights was shorter on the actress than I had anticipated and so she had to keep pulling it down in between shots which became a hassle especially for long shots from behind the character. To solve this problem I should have had the actress try on the T-shirt with just tights prior to filming, so that I would have known the top was too small.