THE INNOCENT

   "The Innocent" is an original horror movie which we filmed a trailer for as our media studies project in 2005. I mean "we" as in a group of year 10 students at Karamu; myself, Laura, Sabrina, Nadia and James.



Roles:

Laura: Actor, organization
Sabrina: Actor, writer
Nadia: Actor, writer
James: Cameraman
Mun (Me): Actor, editor, some filming.

Directed by all.

The Plot

   "The Innocent" is about a close-knit group of 4 very different girls who stumble upon a book of dark magic. They are intrigued by its contents and decide to try out a seance. The seance goes wrong, and soon strange, unexplainable events begin to occur. These events progressively rise in scales of both terrifying and dangerous and throw the girls into varying states of emotional breakdown as they try to deal with the events in their own ways. Death beckons and they find themselves running for their lives. They don't know what they're running from until it's too late.

Writing and Planning

   Sabrina and Nadia were the masterminds behind the writing and the plot of "The Innocent". They created the idea and built on it. Most of the scenes used weren't planned or written; they were filmed last minute at bursts of inspiration. The writing and planning process took the better part of the term; about 4-5 weeks. I don't think we ever came up with a final script, but we didn't need it.

Filming

   Filming "The Innocent" trailer spanned over 3-4 weeks, totally about 14 hours of filming time. At the end, we recorded about 2 hours of footage. All of the places we filmed in were at school, or on the school grounds, except maybe the orchard where we got the "Private Property" shot. Filming locations: squash courts, school library, school field, girls toilets in C block, orchard road, orchard. Amazingly we filmed the trailer almost completely in the right order, except some of the running shots we did before anything else. The talking voiceovers were recorded in the toilets, the screams were in the squash courts. The opening scene of us 4 girls on the field was actually cut from a 9 minute film sequence, so major kudos to James' uber-steady filming hand.

Editing

   Oh yes, this was the fun part. I put together the whole thing in the 2 nights before the project was due in. We'd been editing as a group at school for a while, just loading it onto the school editing computers and splitting the footage into scenes. The title, caption and storyline was finalized in that cramped art room. Mr Hunter finally relented and allowed me to take the camera home. The actual editing process took about 8 hours or more; loading it onto the computer took about an hour, then I trimmed and cut every scene, tracked down some music (with Olivia's help, it's ripped off the Bourne Identity OST, but edited and disfigured on Adobe Audition), recorded about 15 movie trailers so I could steal the final "boom" sound at the end of the trailer. Then it was just a matter of putting it all together.

The Final Product

Click here to watch the finalized trailer of "The Innocent".

Now what?

   Well, now it's a new year and we're going to make the full movie and enter it into a short film competition. Fingers crossed!