Length
Our short film is, all together, 3 minutes and 45 seconds long. The length fits with the short film conventions in that it is not too long, but not short enough that the narrative would not make sense, which is important for a film of our genre. Storyline
The storyline from our film is individualistic from other films of the psychological thriller in the sense that we tell most of our story through camera angles and other non verbal means. The lack of narration, which we see in many other psychological thriller films such as Fight Club, means that the film has an extra usp, which allowed us to experiment through editing and camera work so we could still tell the story we wanted to tell, even with a lack of dialogue throughout. We felt that leaving the audience with an understanding of the film was key, and that if we'rent able to properly explain the film without a dialogue, we wouldn't do the film like this, bit it turned out, through audience research, that the story was easy to identify.
Characters
In 'Twisted' we kept within another short film convention in only having a small number of characters, Mary, Henry and the psychopath. This allowed us to flesh out the relationship between Henry and the psychopath, the mystery surrounding the two was a key part in drawing in the audience. They want to know who the psychopath is, why he killed Henry's wife, they want to know how they got there, where exactly they are, and is Henry who he claims he is? The questions that is brought up by audience trying to understand the characters is a common convention of the genre, and we try to replicate it here.
Twist
Another convention of the psychological thriller, and the short film genre, which we adopted was the 'twist ending'. Our film was built around the twist, we wanted to build a tense atmosphere for the film so that the audience would not necessarily be shocked when the twist when it happened, but rather that they hanging on for it to finally happen. The name of the film, 'Twisted' both hints towards this, as well as being a representation of the state of mind of the two central characters. The twist in our film is that the Henry and the man he is accusing of murdering his wife are in fact the same person, meaning that Henry is in fact the psychopath. The twist is built up slowly, we see the psychopath first before Henry is introduced on screen. This sets up an air of uncertainty in the mind of the audience, as we slowly learn the details of the plot through flashback scenes. The flashback scene is then later re shown with Henry in place of the murderer, making it clear that they are in fact the same person.
Budget and Creativity
Our film was made with almost no budget whatsoever, keeping in line with other independent short films. We used props that had we had on us, and used a friends house as the main location. If we had a larger budget however, I do not feel as if the film would change that much. We wanted to use a typical house as the main location, so we would not need a budget for that, the only thing that might change would be the use of blood in the film. We encountered problems putting blood onto the film in post production as we felt it looked 'cheap', so with a larger budget we could have paid for so we used of make up to give the film and extra 'gritty' feel to it.
Distribution
As a short, independent film, we felt that the majority of our audience would be online. We did not have the large companies to market and mass produce, so posting the film in it's entirety on Youtube was the best way to gain a larger audience.
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