Taken Inspiration

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvUxdQ4q-Lg   - this link is for the trailer of Taken.
This is one of our inspirations for our thriller, we chose TAKEN because of the strong connections it made to sexual slavery, exploitation of women, prostitution and trafficking.

Mood Board

This is our mood board that we have put together to show all of our inspirations and ideas to do with our thriller film. We decided on the topic of ‘Trafficking’ and have had many inspirations; the main one being the film ‘Taken’ which gave us many stimulations in which we could incorporate into the opening 2 minutes of our thriller.

The pictures of Alice from ‘Alice in Wonderland’, I added because we decided that our film would be called ‘Alice: this is our version of Wonderland’. I added the picture of Alice on her own as we wanted to get across the idea of loneliness and isolation that is felt when women are being trafficked.

Because of the idea that women are ‘sold’ when they are being trafficked, I added a For Sale sign which I think works exceptionally well as a representation. The smaller pictures such as the £10 note and the eye, I added to show that people are paying for the women and the eyes show that the outside world are seeing these things happen but not doing anything to prevent them.

The women who are being used as slaves are seen as puppets. They are blindfolded, gagged and drugged to allow their ‘owners’ to take advantage of their vulnerability. I have added pictures to show these e.g. the advert for ‘stop trafficking’ shows a lady with strings attached to her.

I think the most hard-hitting, scary picture on the board is the one of the girls being shown naked, inside a meat packaging with ‘FRESH MEAT’ written on a sticker on the packaging. This gives us a very good insight on exactly what the women are seen as.



moodboard for trafficking

This mood-board has been produced using images surrounding trafficking and sex slavery. We wanted to create a visual summation of the images that would inspire us in the production of our thriller. These images have been chosen because of their shocking and disturbing content. We will use the mood-board for inspiration when creating our poster and our trailer.

Human Trafficking

Whilst conducting research into the subject of Human Trafficking I came across this fictional series -that is based on real stories - on YouTube and decided to take a look at the first part. I ended up watching the entire series because I was completely consumed by the disturbing and graphic content. The series follows the stories of sex trafficking victims across the world and the inhumane underworld that they are forced into after they are kidnapped, beaten and raped for the first of many times.
The series does not do anything to disguise the reality of what happens to these people as they are exploited beyond belief. As an audience member I was entirely fixated and my focus did not break throughout the entire series, it is shocking, disturbing, sickening and leaves you in a state of disbelief. It showed me the entire subject from many viewpoints, particularly the viewpoint of those individuals conducting the crime. I was able to see how the victims 'owners' operate and how they lure, manipulate, threaten and control their victims.
This provided an insight into the psychological damage that the victims endure and the long-term effect it has on them.
A quote from the film that really stood out for me was this; ‘An ounce of cocaine, wholesale 1200 dollars but you can only sell it once, a woman or a child 50-100 dollars but you can sell them each day every day over and over and over again. The mark up is immeasurable.’This series has influenced the way in which I plan to approach the making of our thriller; I now want to create something that shows how alarmingly close sexual trafficking is to you and how easy it is for criminals to target and abduct their victims. Every year over 1,000,000 children, women and men are trafficked and once they are gone, they are rarely found again. In most cases they die within 4 years as they are overworked, murdered or beaten to death. Many victims contract STDs, Hepatitis or AIDS, also resulting in death. I hope for our Thriller to be just as realistic and hard-hitting as this series was for me.

Video on Trafficking.

This is a short film on trafficking that we watched on youtube, it gave us an insight into how trafficking works and how women can be trapped into it.
Obviously our thriller will not be as graphic as this due to this video showing some scenes not suitable for our possible target audience, however it gave us some ideas on mise en scene we could use.
This video also gave us some idea's on how a thriller based around this subject would open, and what elements it could include.
It also gave us some idea's for making a trailer for our two minute thriller, possibly showing women protesting against trafficking and maybe using a voice-over. This could be effective in explaining, from a victims point of view, how trafficking effects people and could also give our audience a feel for what our thriller will be about, without giving too much away.
This video also showed us the effect trafficking can have on the women who are trapped within the cult and are subjected to being trafficked. We were inspired by a scene at the end of the clip where a women slits her wrist, this could be shown in our thriller with the use of special effects and make-up. We also gained some ideas on camera angles and cuts we could use to show certain areas of trafficking, without actually showing them and letting our audience use their imagination.

Research on Trafficking

Research on Trafficking

  

What is trafficking?

Trafficking involves transporting people away from the communities in which they live and forcing them to work against their will using violence and deception. When children are trafficked, no violence, deception or coercion needs to be involved: simply transporting them into exploitative conditions constitutes trafficking. People are trafficked both between countries and within the borders of a state.

Once having crossed the border, a trafficked migrant is further exploited in coercive or inhuman conditions. People are trafficked for the purpose of sexual and labour exploitation or the removal of organs. Women and children are particularly affected: women and girls represent 56 % of victims of forced economic exploitation and 98 % of victims of involuntary commercial sexual exploitation. Children are also trafficked to be exploited for begging or illegal activities, such as minor theft.

The vast majority of people who are trafficked are migrant workers. They are seeking to escape poverty and discrimination, improve their lives and send money back to their families. They hear about well-paying jobs abroad through family, friends or recruitment agencies. But when they arrive in the country they find that the work they were promised does not exist and they are forced instead to work in jobs or conditions to which they did not agree.

The UN definition of trafficking

Article 3 of the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the Convention on Transnational Organised Crime (2000), defines trafficking as:

"the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception,

of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purposes of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery or servitude or the removal of organs."

Victims

The majority of women and girls who are victimised are between the ages of 18 and 24, 1.2 million children trafficked every year, 95% experience physical or sexual violence, 43% used for forced commercial sexual exploitation 98% being women and girls, 32% used for forced economic exploitation.

The Facts about Human Trafficking

1. Human Trafficking is the fastest growing form of international crime and is now the second largest illegal trade in the world.

2. It is estimated that 600,000 – 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year.

3. The UK is a significant destination country for women, children and men to be trafficked into the sex trade.

4. One woman can earn a trafficker between £500 and £1000 a week, that’s £26,000-£52,000 per year from one victim. Trafficking for sexual exploitation is a high-profit and low-risk effort for traffickers however not for the sufferers; some women are forced to work 16 hours and have sex with numerous men a day.

5. Most women and children trafficked for sexual manipulation suffer life-threatening violations of their human rights, including the right to liberty, the right to dignity and security of person, the right not to be held in slavery or involuntary enslavement, the right to be free from unpleasant and inhumane treatment, the right to be free from violence and the right to health.

6. Physical violence, psychological torture, physical restraint in the form of locks and guards, drugging, and instilling fear through threats are just some of the ways traffickers control their victims. Trafficked migrants usually have their passports taken away on arrival. Without their documents they cannot prove they have a right to be in the country and therefore cannot go to the authorities for assistance.

7. If trafficked-women are freed or manage to escape, immigration policies in the UK can put them at risk of deportation. This makes women very vulnerable to re-trafficking, to becoming perpetrators of trafficking or to being rejected by their families and communities; some of whom may have sold them in the first place.

8. Whilst the help available to victims of human trafficking in the UK is limited, there is legislation in place to support these women once identified. However, if these women are not identified as victims of trafficking or they do not fulfil the specific criteria, for example being willing to testify against their traffickers, then they risk being labelled as illegal immigrants without the help and support of groups working to aid these women, they often slip through the gaps and are denied any specific support or opportunity.

9. There are currently three housing providers across the whole of the UK who provide 80 spaces for survivors of trafficking; one of these is government funded.

British Board Of Film Classification

This information gives us idea of where to place our thriller within the age catagories.
We are either going to place our thriller as: 

15 certificate:

Or an 18 age certificate:

As we are undecided on whether it will be suitable for a 15 because of what it is based on (Human Trafficking).

Codes and Conventions of a Triller

Initial Ideas for thriller names

Preliminary Task

This is our finished Prelim.

storyboard and analysis of prelim


Analysis of the Prelim

In pre-production of the Prelim task, we watched examples of previous students’ prelims which helped us pin point error. One example was a student’s prelim where they filmed a girl walking up the stairs and then the next shot was her on the bottom floor. This helped us make sure our prelim flowed correctly between each shot.

We also had Year 13s advise us on the prelim task, which we learnt what certain shots had to be included into our prelim.

During the production of our prelim we realised the problems we faced was background noise and footage, as people kept walking into the shot and students were running around shouting. This has helped us for our main Thriller as we have thought more deeply into the location and setting, to make sure there are no disruptions or footage that does not fit the Thriller for example public walking through the shot.

The filming of the Prelim took much longer than expected as we had to keep re-doing the shot when distractions came or not fitting footage. We also had to make sure the shots were taken from the exact angle that fitted the previous shot; this slowed us down as we had to look over previous footage.

If we could do anything different we would probably do a storyboard of the prelim before the task to help us know exactly what to shoot and what works. We also would change the location of where we were shooting, to a much quieter place. This will help us when it comes to shooting our Thriller.

During post production, in editing, we learnt how to write over the footage this would be useful for the title of our Thriller. We also learnt how to put transitions into the film properly.

When watching back the prelim task the finished product actually looks better than our original ideas as editing helped improve it dramatically, through flow and inserting extras such as writing.

Do's and Dont's.

Here are the Do's and Dont's that were produced following the year 13's advice. This will be used to help start us off with our thriller coursework.