13 Reasons Why

We used the Netflix series '13 Reasons Why' as a key source of inspiration for our piece with the connection of sexual assault present throughout. The posters published ahead of the release of the series are not only creative but very powerful in attracting the right audience whilst not revealing important aspects of the narrative. 

Posters of individual characters were also released with a re-occuring theme of words masked over their faces- indicating but not revealing the plot effectively. Here are some examples:

Production Companies - working off of original ideas and feedback

When considering production companies, we analysed what production companies were producing similar style pieces to the issue of sexual assault that we were portraying.
We researched what companies focused in on pieces that were within the social realism genre and explored what companies were available for us to attribute to our piece.

One of the main companies that came out as the most popular was Netflix, as in recent years the company has started to produce many documentaries based upon issues in the world. More recently, Netflix have begun to tackle more taboo issues within society, for example 'Hot Girls Wanted' that focuses in women forced into prostitution or 'The Hunting Ground', focused in on the sexual assault amongst female college students in order to protect the freedom of the football students in America.

We showed people different production companies and explained the narrative of our piece (with the help of a storyboard) and allowed them to choose which company was their favourite. The majority replied with Netflix and this followed our own views as some of the more recent pieces have had the same issue (sexual assault) as our own piece.

As our piece focuses in on one specific character, it appears as a movie similar to 'The Lovely Bones', however there is focus into the realisation that the attack is from no fault of our protagonist and victim, and rather the acts of the attacker. This makes the piece similar to 'The Hunting Ground' and 'Audrie and Daisy', both of which aim to shine a light on the consequences of silencing the crime of sexual assault.

Inspiration- The Lovely Bones

One of our inspirations for both the colour palette and the genre of our piece came from 'The Lovely Bones'. We decided that this provided an excellent colour palette as the contrast of yellow and blue together enables us to fully explore the ideas we had for symbolism in the piece. We are planning on using a flickering candle and a cracking egg together and we decided that the use of pale blues for the egg and more vibrant yellow/mild orange would be useful for the candle. When the candle light goes out we decided that the change of acting would be perfect to blend in the palette, making the smoke go to a blue-grey colour.

The Lovely Bones is the story of Susie Salmon, who is sexually assaulted and murdered by her neighbour who is then able to get away with his crime within the neighbourhood, to the dismay of Susie's father who discovers the truth. The film ends with final justice being delivered upon the neighbour. The film related to the piece that we wanted to do as the focus is on child sexual assault and kidnapping. Whilst it is later revealed in the film that Susie has been murdered, we wanted to show a similar theme of the aftermath of sexual assault, however our actress doesn't die and instead we aim to depict the life that assault victims have to try to lead.

Location scouting 3

For various shots within our teaser trailer we decided to film in a bedroom. For this, we used the bedroom of a 17 year old girl. Here are some pictures we took when filming:

Location scouting 2

We also visited a park in Greenwich to film shots for the beginning of our trailer. Here are some pictures from the day:

Location scouting 1

We visited Oxleas Woods to explore potential locations in which we could use for the first part of our teaser trailer.

Here are some pictures I took throughout the day:

Inspiration

Here's a poster displaying a few quotes and phrases we drew from a variety of media outlets in our research and planning stage. We drew inspiration from these.