Assignment

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4D Project : Retelling of myths

 

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PG13 | Horror, Murder-Mystery | Coming Soon

A murder mystery revolving around a teenage girl who struggles with her own sinister agenda.

Writer: Leon Poh

 

A lawyer, Sal, decided to take a high profiled case of a teenage murder in Singapore. He describes Sheena as a simple girl, bizarre,weird but still a nice little girl. He explained her rough childhood, having her mother had died when she was really young, she moved from family to family but no one wanted her because she never showed any signs of love and hardly spoke. She finally settled down with her grandmother who was already old and in bad health. Her mother was murdered when she was really young and she claimed that she was murdered by a wolf-like creature and since then has always carried a knife around as protection.

 

Sheena was often bullied at school, being a closed off child and suspicious of the people around her. She never wanted to go out and play or do anything with the other kids at school and she was always the subject of teasing. Because of this one red hoodie that she would always wear, her nickname was Red.

 

Sheena always had frequent nightmares, dreaming of screams and seeing that

she had cuts all over her arms and legs, he knew that she was a troubled girl and she claimed that she had night terrors of a wolf that wants to take her away and that she did not murder anyone.

She would always refer to that beast that she’s so scared of as ‘it’ when she was younger. He thinks it was all hallucinations as she always insisted that something was after her, a wild animal that followed her around. Sal assumes that those are just hallucinations made up by her mind when she was a child.

She had a best friend in school, Sandy, who like her, was an outcast and a bookworm. In school they had a game where if a guy could get a girl to sleep with her, they would win. Hank, a star football player spun the bottle and it landed on Sandy. Hank starts flirting with Sandy. Sheena warned her that it was impossible that he would fall for her and that he would end up breaking her feelings. Sandy thinks Sheena is jealous and stops calling her and talking to her. She is filled with rage and sadness, knowing her best friend doesn’t even trust her.

Sandy gives in to Hank’s advances and sleeps with Hank. After they are done, Hank leaves the house and Hank rejects Sandy’s invitation for lunch the following day.

It was at that moment that Sandy realises that Sheena was right all along. She returns to her room and sobs. She calls Sheena and pours her heart out to her and Sheena told her she would always be there for her. The next day she is found dead downstairs her block. Police deemed it as suicide and when Sheena hears the news she breaks out in tears.

She tells Sal that she was still traumatised by her best friend’s death. She wanted find out the truth behind her friend’s death. That night, Sheena decides to confront Hank and find out the truth. He heads over to his house and waits. She feels as if she’s being followed and turns around to see a werewolf like creature prance out and starts attacking her. Hank hears her screams and runs over and gets mauled by the wolf. Red flees the scene but drops her knife.

 

The police finds a knife at the scene and traces it back to Sheena. She realises that she dropped the knife. The lawyer tells Sheena that they have sufficient evidence to convict her. She insists that she did not kill Hank and that it was probably the werewolf figure she saw.

Security footage captured a person in a red hoodie stabbing Hank and upon closer inspection, showed Sheena’s face.

Shock to realised that maybe she was the one who actually killed Hank, she starts breaking down in sheer grief, which triggers her to starts turning into a new persona. Violently shaking and confessing that she did indeed kill Hank. She leaps over the desk and starts strangling Sal. As Sal is about to lose consciousness, he grabs a pen and stabs her in her arm. Sal hands Sandy over to a psychiatrist which after careful examination from the psychiatrist she is deemed as having multiple personalities triggered by sadness or anger.

During trial, Sheena transforms into that persona, making a growling sound and barking while threatening to kill everyone in the courtroom. The guards try to hold her back. The judge then sentences her to life in prison at a mental institution.

As Sal visits Sheena in the mental institution, he tells her that it’s going to be okay and that she’ll be rehabilitated soon. He  She begins turning into the other persona and confesses to the murder of her best friend Sandy and her mother. Saying they both deserved to die for their selfish ways. She looks back at him and says that she likes it there and she finally found a place where people actually cared for her.

 

 

 

Breaking it down :

I wanted to play with the idea of Red Riding Hood as the story revolved around her meeting the wolf and eventually the wolf visits the grandmother. Remember how the wolf acts as red riding hood and breaks into the grandmother’s house and eats her. What if the wolf and red was actually the same person and tricked the grandmother into opening the door.

 

I wanted to create twists and turns to play on the instincts of the audience. In the beginning I wanted to make it seem as if she was actually innocent and then realise that she actually has split personality disorder and that she had murdered the people around her who she loved. Flashbacks showed how Sheena pushed Sandy off her window and how she attacked her mother years ago. Shocked by this revelation, Sal leaves the rehabilitation center, knowing he cannot do anything to undo her charge.

 

I wanted to use the wolf as a personification of her primal instincts. Showing how anger and jealousy can take over our body and using red as a colour to symbolize danger.

 

 

 

3 ACT STRUCTURE

Sheena is shown to be living a normal life before she was arrested for murder. She denies responsibility and claims that a wolf is terrorising her, trying to kill the ones she loved and ruining her life

 

She denies having killed anyone and that she was innocent. That she was simply trying to find out the truth behind her best friend’s death.

 

It was revealed that she had multiple personalities and was triggered by anger and rage. She then confesses to the murders of the people around her who she loved so much ; her mother and her best friend.

 

4D Assignment 2 – The Hostage

Explanation :

Inspired by dramas and mainly horror films such as The Hostel, I wanted a concept revolving around a kidnapping and put a local twist on it.

I began with a newspaper article to give a an overarching concept of the story. I also wanted to introduce the hero of the narrative in the first scene. By using a light sepia tone in the darkness, I wanted to create a more suspenseful atmosphere and introduced the villain in the form of a dark silhouette. I used the casting of the shadow of the villain to symbolise his evil status. Using different camera angles I wanted to give a voyeuristic view for the audience and to have empathy for the hero. I also used focus on the foreground and blurring the backgrounds for certain scenes to give depth. I wanted to follow the three act structure but at the same time give a twist by having her not fully recover from the main ordeal she had undergone. I also wanted to make use of motion blur to show movement and desaturated the images to convey the monotonous sadness in the film. Following the three act structure, I wanted to end with the hero returning safely but add on the twist at the end. I also used an array of camera angles to capture different images such as using a low angle to show the space of the living conditions of the hostage and using an aerial shot to capture the cutting scene.