Preliminary Exercise - Editing and Costume

For our preliminary exercise we are using Adobe Premier Elements CS4 to edit the opening sequence, I am playing the part of the young woman who is the kidnapper.

After discussion we decided that the text should be inspired by Schindler's List with the girl in red and chose to use the same effect in our task. This effect is to isolate the colour red solely making the rest of the shot black and white, this brings more emphasis to the red coat and the red lipstick that the actress is wearing.

A Screenshot of Schindler's List

Here is a photo of what the actress was wearing in colour:

By bringing emphasis to the costumes we create more mystery to the character since the audience cannot focus on her facial features giving a mysterious aspect to the piece. Isolating the colour red causes the colour to emphasised which can signify blood, danger, strength and power. It also represents love, desire and passion. In our task we made sure that the more positive thoughts of red were abolished by the director telling the actress to stand up straight and rigid with a businesslike posture, also the director said to keep the actresses head up high to show the power over the other character - the actress was also told not to smile and to keep a straight face when talking to the other character.

Black is another key colour in the costume which is connoted with power, death, evil and mystery. Black is a mysterious colour because of fear and the unknown; which is what the hostage would have felt when seeing her as well as this it has a negative connotation for example: blacklist, black humour and the black death. Also black contrasts well with bright colours so when combined with red it gives an aggressive colour scheme.

Photo of Tom Godfrey who plays the hostage:

For our hostage, Tom Godfrey, his costume included a blue, white and dark purple striped t-shirt with black trousers and black converses. Blue can symbolise innocence and purity, along with dark purple which evokes gloom and sad feelings so it can show what the actor is feeling on the inside. Along with the base colour of white which also represents purity and innocence along with goodness. So with his t-shirt compared with the actresses clothing it clearly shows who is the villain and who is the hero.

As a team we chose black trousers and black converses so that it could show a dark side to him and that he has possibly done something bad and that's why the kidnapper has taken him. His clothing is casual to give a first impression of that he is a normal guy on the outside and also that when she kidnapped him when he wasn't prepared.

After discussing we decided not to use the isolated colour effect as it did not always recognise red leaving grey patches and also it highlighted red in other areas which we did not want it to like the curtains and floorboards. However the black and white effect compliments the text and the atmosphere of the piece so we added the effect onto the film.

Using our knowledge of symbolisation to create the costumes for this product will help us because we can choose better costumes in future, therefore improving the quality of our piece.