Real life incidents that are similar to our characters, and how they influenced development/costume

When we were researching more into real life incidents, we thought it would be useful to find someone who related with the characters we have created in our film. We knew that we wanted to make the film a psychological thriller. Therefore, we needed to be clever with the way in which we chose the story line and the characters. We wanted to have a vulnerable, younger aged girl to give of the effect of hopelessness and torture, and we wanted to contrast this with a mysterious male figure.

The Male character 

The first thing we wanted to do was find a male figure we could imitate and elaborate on. We found a man called Robert Oxnam. He was an American scholar who spend his life studying Chinese culture he was also former president of the Asia society and a consultant for matters regarding china. We used this point as we wanted our male character to be very intelligent and vindictive. 

However, Robert Oxnam struggled with his mental health. Oxnam planned to leave his therapy, even though they concluded that he had 11 separate personalities. He didn't have any therapy or help, therefore his dual personality disorder was progressing.

Robert had 3 main personalities, he would have personalities which he would change drastically to, according to what emotions he felt. 

This research of finding someone similar to our character really helped us to understand, in depth, what we wanted to portray him as in our film. It allowed us to create a more realistic character, which can ultimately lead to a more convincing film.

Another thing we wanted to research on, was what our male character was going to wear. When researching, we stumbled over a very successful TV series called ‘Pretty Little Liars’. Within this show there is an evil main character whom bases the main plot point of the whole show, however nobody knows who they are, they just know him/her by their vague name 'A'. You get glimpses of their hands, which are in black gloves, and glimpses from behind, but they are always wearing a black hoodie with the hood up, so nobody really knows who that person is. We liked this idea of concealment and the mysterious vibe that came along with it, as it gets the audience engaged. This research was mostly used just to back up our existing point [the fact you don't see the evil character], and make sure we made the right choices in characteristics and personality traits. It also influenced the costume design for the evil character, we want him to look smart but after reading this we thought the whole costume should be black and with some patients clothing mixed into it. We did this so that the character could reflect his range of personalities with his clothing.







Here are some sketched ideas for his costume and what we ultimately chose to be his costume:

He has long hair.

The Female Character

Our female character is about a girl who is in captivity, we wanted to base it around someone who was around the age of 12-22. In real life there is a story of a girl called Sabine Dardenne, from Belgium, who was abducted by a child molester and a serial killer. This girl was kept in a tiny basement. The basement was hidden, and very dirty. She didn't get any food and was kept in captivity for 80 days (she survived). This story intrigued many ideas and interested us (in a creative way). We assumed the place that she was kept was very scary and creepy, but after seeing the photos we knew it was horrific.




As you can see, the ceiling is very low which creates a sense of confinement and claustrophobia. The place probably felt a lot like a jail cell (it technically was because she was trapped). From this we get an idea of filming the space in a jail cell, and developing on the idea of captivity and confinement, we won't necessarily be using a small space to film, but will definitely be using the concept of being trapped against one's will.