Preproduction: Mise-en-scene

Actors at the high school location in Scream (1996)

          Look Who's Stalking? is coming along great! Josie and I are going to begin filming very soon and are excited about this stage of our project. However, we have made some changes to our storyline and where the film is going to take place. We decided that because the length of our project is so limited, transitioning between two locations would really take up a lot of time in the opening that could be used better. Instead we have chosen to have our film located at the school and only the school, to ease the production process. This does change the film's storyline a bit since we were planning on shooting in the woods; this shot will still be included in the film, but in a different location.

On set of the film Booksmart (2019)

          The school's actual campus and the huge parking lot give us a couple options for filming locations, the steep set of stairs leading to the parking lot also allow us to capture some great shots!We want our film to make viewers feel like they are back in high school. To do this, we want to shoot some of the basic aspects of school campuses: courtyard, stairs, lockers, etc. By using these buildings and objects as backdrops or props for the scene, this can bring our viewers back to when they were in high school and create a sense of nostalgia. The school setting will then establish the age of our characters and also the time period (now) when the film takes place.

"Westburg High School", setting for Heathers (1989)

          The goal of the film is to make the audience feel like they are being humored and frightened. In order to make our audience find humor in the film, we plan on overplaying the stereotypes of horror films and making the Stalker's motives obvious to everyone except Brittany, who is too busy answering DM's on her phone. Using the reverse shot, we want to show the audience the character's conversations. By having on-screen sound this helps make the film seem more realistic since the audience can see where audio is originating from, most of the dialogue however will probably be recorded in post production. I have drawn inspiration from other teen films such as Heathers (1989), Book Smart (2019), and the horror film Scream (1996). In this post, there are some images and clips that reflect what I want our film to look like!