A2 - Costume and Prop Ideas

For our costumes, we had very few strict ideas. We wanted each member of the group to be wearing a poppy, because our filming was done on Remembrance Day and it was thematic. We also wanted our killer to be disguised in some way, so we looked into a variety of different masks and scarves to hide the face.

Alex and I demonstrating two of our original costume ideas.

One of the designs we considered was using a ghillie suit-style costume, so he was walking around wearing very realistic camouflage. One of the main issues with this, however, was going to be the acquisition or creation of a ghillie suit. We did manage to obtain one in the end, as Alex has one that is used for Airsoft. However, we did not have the killer wear the ghillie suit, due to concerns with filming it. We instead placed part of the ghillie suit in the indoors set, so it still featured in the footage.

Another costume design we considered was the use of a gas mask to hide the face. Again, we thought there may be issues with finding a gas mask that was safe to wear. We did find one to borrow from the school's drama props, which the killer did wear in the footage. We also placed it in the indoors set, so that it could be filmed close up before the killer donned it for the action scenes.

Because we returned the gas mask and it was borrowed by another person when we needed to go back and shoot our night footage, we decided to instead use a balaclava or a face mask of some sort. In the dark it will be more difficult to make out the killer anyway, so people may not be able to tell if he is wearing a gas mask or a different style of mask.

We also wanted to focus on the idea that the killer may have a connection to the military subtextually, to suggest a reason as to how and why he has several guns lying around his property. To create this, we used an Airsoft outfit that looked like genuine military wear.

For the guns seen in the trailer, we used realistic-looking Airsoft guns. These were provided by Alex in order to make our killer seem like more of a threat than he would if he was carrying only a knife or was unarmed. By having multiple guns, it also allowed us to play about with other ideas, including having a scene where the group take some of the other guns from the house and use them against the killer. However, despite filming this scene, we cut it from the trailer because it felt out-of-place, even if it was the logical thing for the characters to do. We wanted the killer to stand out because he was the only one using guns, and therefore he posed more of a threat to the characters. If we were to make the trailer into a full film, we may have used those scenes in the footage, but we chose not to for the trailer.

In addition, both kitchen knives and a wood-cutting axe were also already at the location we filmed, so we included them as well. We also purchased several packets of liver, which we placed around the location to create more horrific images, as it was unclear from a cursory glance what type of meat it was and therefore was creepy-looking and would convey horror to the audience, implying that the killer has killed humans before.