When writing my screenplay, I conducted research into the themes, locations and characters of the story which you can read below. However, some things had to be changed, or they developed into something else throughout production.
Themes
As mentioned above, the key themes for the film were about exploring loneliness and deceit. The film explores the extent someone might go to to try and make friends. Dave listens in on people's conversations to try and fit in. This is a similar scenario to the film One Hour Photo, where a character played by Robin Williams makes copies of photos for himself to study what is normal and feel like he fits in.
To study the theme of deceit/betrayal, which is evident in most films, I watched Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. In this, one of the characters is an undercover cop who betrays the others by giving away the location of a jewellery shop they were about to rob. Although there is nothing this dramatic in our film, it was useful to see how deceit can be portrayed well in film.
What changes were made from the script to the film?
A number of things meant minor adjustments to the original script I wrote had to be made. The most significant of these was the ending, in which originally our lead character was considering committing suicide. However, feedback on the script told us they felt that the situation was not dealt with appropriately in the story due to certain real life resemblances. Additionally, feedback received in a survey I put out had a significant number of respondents saying they would feel uncomfortable watching something of that nature. Therefore, we opted to remove the section of the script from the film, and instead focus on the character's emotions.
Another thing we had to change was due to the casting. The characters in the script are aged between young twenties to mid thirties, but as college students we found it difficult to attract actors of those ages to work for free on a project. As a result the actor playing the main character was only 15 at the time of shooting, and the journalist only 17. Despite this I am happy with the appearances of the characters within the short film, as I think they were dressed appropriately for the parts and responded to the scenarios in more adult ways.
During the editing process, we made several choices which slightly changed the overall film. In the script there was a second written section between Damien and the stranger, which the film's audience were able to hear - but none of the characters. In this section it would become clear that Damien was not a traitor to the theatre, but instead the stranger was a private investigator Damien had hired. We recorded all the audio for this scene, but it was cut because I felt the story was becoming overly complicated. To add to this sense of mystery around his character, we included a shot of the cleaner seemingly discovering something of secret importance to Damien in the middle section of the film; later on when Damien returns to the theatre and is talking to Dave, he picks up this piece of paper and tucks it away in his jacket pocket thus concealing the mystery. This leaves Damien's whole character mysterious to the audience, they equally don't know whether or not Dave should be trusting him. To amplify this, you may notice that in the final few shots of the scene we do not see Damien's face at all - this was a deliberate choice to conceal what he might be thinking and make him even more ominous.
Other editorial choices included the removal of a couple of small detail shots in order to improve the pace of the film. The whole middle sequence was not intended to be one long montage, rather some montage parts with small scenes happening around it. This choice was made not only to speed up the amount of time the film was taking to edit, but also to make the pace of the film better and conceal the fact that we had not had enough time to shoot everything within that sequence. I am incredibly happy with this montage regardless; I think the music choice is good, and the wide shot of the movement around the theatre is interesting and engaging.
Locations
Despite all the changes we did have to make to the original planning and script, we were able to secure the location that we wanted for two days of filming. We had some restrictions with filming due to health and safety shooting on the theatre's lighting rig, but we were mostly able to overcome these. The location through Norwich city centre was scrapped however in a late re-write which removed the necessity to use more than the one location.
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