Treatment: Dressing the Set

One of the most important things to do when preparing to shoot was to dress the set appropriately for both the mood of the film opening and the personality of the protagonist. We wanted to create the impression of a sophisticated environment due to the fact that our actress, Yssy, is younger than the part she is playing, as our character is an adult (in her early twenties). By dressing both her and the set in a more sophisticated manner and keeping the dialogue mature, the audience would be more likely to suspend their disbelief and ignore her actual age. As well as this, we wanted to create a very sultry ambiance which we thought would be ideal for establishing the genre in the opening sequence and would add to the fact that the protagonist is a femme fatale.

In order to dress the set, we started by removing anything we believed to be too childish or not appropriate for the desired mood of the sequence - as the set was in the room of a 16 year old. This included removing dream catchers which were hanging and cards, unplugging any cables which were in the frame, removing objects of certain colours (such as bright pink) which we believed to be childish as well as getting rid of any photographs which were not of the characters in the film. This was the set:

From there, we realised that we wished to show that the protagonist, Rose, is an organised person and decided that this would be displayed through the fact that her dressing table is kept neatly, as visible in the picture below. Apart from this, however, it was also important to make sure that the dressing table contents still looked natural: as if she had used them before as opposed to being too neat. We wanted to fill up as much of the space on the dressing table whilst maintaining the impression of organisation.We also had to arrange the dressing table very specifically, as some shots were of the perfumes; and we wanted to show perfume bottles that were in coherence with our colour theme (red, black, but also other colours that looked mature and not too stereotypically 'girly'), and that 'looked the part' - mature and alluring. Having said that, we had to ensure that there was no product placement, and simply did so by turning the product labels away from our view.

During the development of our initial idea, we had decided on two main colours which we thought reflected the personality of the character: red and black. Red to depict anger, danger, revenge, passion, love and desire and allure. Black depicts the darkness within her, and her secrecy/the fact she is hiding 'in the dark' - not revealing her true identity etc. The black we decided to incorporate in the costume choices, but the red is more evident in the objects around her. We used colours throughout the set in order to create our desired effect::

• Despite there not being specific shots where the bed is in view, we decided to dress it with a deep red quilt. This would be in case part of the bed was ever caught in the shot. The bed initially has a white blanket, which we did not feel was suitable for our desired ambiance due to the associations between white and purity, virginity or innocence, all of which we felt would go against the personality and actions of the character.
• Many of the perfume bottles were red. We had one which was in the shape of a heart, which we decided would be symbolic if we partly hid it behind a darker perfume bottle. This is because of both the fact that she is manipulating her boyfriend by using his feelings for her to find out where her sister is hidden and also because she does not expect to actually fall in love with him later on in the film.
• Other perfume bottles are darker. One of the more prominent ones is black and is in the shape of a moon, which symbolises darkness and night. This is in front of the brighter bottles, which gives the sense of foreshadowing what is to come later on in the film, and even later on in the opening sequence when the audience is given the impression that she is not genuine when speaking to her boyfriend.
• The photograph our protagonist was looking at (of her and her sister) has lots of red within it:

Again, although we had not planned for it to be seen, we made sure to also dress the bedside table in the event that it is caught on camera. We decided to put some motivational books there in order to give more of a sense of her personality.