CHANGES: Narrative

Our narrative largely changed and developed overtime, from our original treatment to our final outcome. 

We found that when planning and creating shot lists, we had developed our narrative to the extent that it was much like a short film - rather than a film opening. This would have limited the storyline of the wider film as well as audience anticipation. 

We overcame this by changing our plot, placing a bigger focus on building suspense through short snippets of the stalker's work and moments of Sarah's personal life that the stalker had captured on camera. Our main aim was to create enigma, a typical convention of film openings, and found we could not do this if we revealed too much about Sarah or too much about the stalker. So instead we focused on the process of stalking, engaging audiences as they wonder who the stalker is, and why they are so obsessed with Sarah.

An example of a change we made to do this was in the filming of the final scene. We had originally planned to reveal the stalker's identity as Sarah's best friend, however to maintain suspense and tension throughout the wider film agreed to change the final shot from a close-up of the stalker's face, to a close up of the camera, concealing the face. 

A second major change we made, was to the positioning of the lacrosse scene within our narrative. Initially, we were going to have the lacrosse scene as our first scene - to introduce the talented Sarah (and star talent) and a potential motive for the stalking. It was only during the last stages of the editing process when we decided to change the sequence's position to further back, when Sarah had already noticed an unsettling presence in her life. By doing this, we positioned lacrosse as her character's escape but then proved in the following scene that the stalker even has even invaded her personal life. 

When editing, we had to make a slight refinement when we listened to the audio of the clips. We found that wind presented an issue as it interfered with the sound quality. As the actual shots were successful, we decided to change the sound codes for that scene, by adding in non-diegetic music that was playing through her headphones.

We reshot the entirety of the conversation between Sarah and her best friend, due to finding that the lighting could have been better and the sound quality was not sufficient, due to being filmed in a noisy setting. This challenge was actually for the better, as we ended up reshooting in a new location with a much more successful outcome.