For our film opening, it is a low budget thriller indie film
that has hints of psychological traits. The director we have chosen for
directing and inspiration for our film opening is Shane Meadows because he is
known for making short low budget British films. For example, Dead Man’s Shoes
is a psychological thriller that is incredibly similar to our genre that we
have because of our whole flashback concept. The film deals with the struggle
of human life with themes of revenge and violence. This is similar to how our
film opening has implied murder and extremely disturbing shots of blood.
Meadows is known for using unknown small time actors to convey to the audience
that these people in the film are just normal day-to-day people and is also as
a result of his low budget.
Another benefit of having Shane Meadows as our director is
his skills in directing the actors to work around a rough script, but also
having them improvise some lines. This helps to create a realistic feel to the
characters and makes them more believable instead of the cliché Hollywood US
one-liners and dramatic pauses that aren’t realistic. Furthermore he uses a lot
of dark low-key lighting as seen in Dead Man’s Shoes to create a nihilistic perspective
of life and is usually used to let the audience know that this film will not
have a ‘happy’ ending. His varied use of
camera angles and shots is especially effective at conveying emotion and can
vary from low angles to long shots which is implemented in our film because we have a wide range of camera
techniques such as shot-reverse-shot and extreme close ups to name a few.
Meadows also doesn’t use much high angle or any bird’s eye shots because of his
limited budget and is only used at the end of Dead Man’s Shoes as the ending
shot. This also corresponds to our film because we didn’t use many high angles
because it wouldn’t have fit in with the atmosphere of the film opening since
it would reveal too much.
The production company that we have chosen for our film
opening is Warp Films who are an independent film company based in the UK. They
were also known for making Dead Man’s Shoes and a lot of other Shane Meadow’s
films so it makes sense to use the same production company that he uses. They
are most known for taking risks such as the film Four Lions which is a comedy
based on Islamic bombers and conducting jihad. Therefore they are perfect to be
our production company since they are not too sensitive to offensive and
violent material. Our film has blood and gore so Warp Films would be
professionals at the film production for our opening.
The marketing campaign as part of the exhibition will consist of billboards of the film, interviews with the director Shane Meadows and there will be a website set up to advertise the film. The actors' IMDB and Wikipedia page will have their status changed to 'Missing' which is influenced from The Blair Witch Project as the actors were also 'Missing' prior to the film's release. This sparked interest from the public at that time and made people want to watch the film more.