Evaluation of Max Kill

For my media project I wanted to create a piece of film which caused suspense in the audience and tricked the audience into thinking the film was one thing, but finding out that it was another.
The very beginning of our film shows a woman getting ready supposedly for a date; we have a mini montage of clips and cross cutting from the woman to a man also getting dressing up smartly. This suggests that the couple are both getting ready for a date. Our montage was inspired by “Legally Blond”, a complete opposite to our thriller themed film but we felt that this all built up to the mysterious ending where the woman (Claudia) comes face to face with her killer Max Kill, appropriately the name of out film. My main inspiration came from “Psycho”, and we put a direct link in our film, everybody recognises the famous shower scene and so we added a shot of the shower to denote danger I hoped that this would mean that subconsciously people would foresee the danger that was ahead of Claudia. Another film that inspired us was “Sin City”, the violent film is black and white most of the way through with hints of colour in places and conveniently because of technical reasons our film looked better in black and white which added a film noire feeling to it, we tried to copy “Sin City” by adding hints of colour such as when Claudia puts on red lipstick but we didn’t have the technology to do so. This turned out well because it made the film more appealing for an older audience being in black and white, this was lucky as our target audience is the older generation. Although we managed to tern around our technical problems for the better it was still a hard task to get over, in colour our film was very grainy and visually unappealing this was due to lack of lighting on set as we planed to film at night. We learnt a lot from this mistake as we now know that lighting is vital for the look of the film. We even had to re-shoot because of this problem and made the same mistake again by waiting to long to start filming, we realised that we could have simply filmed the scene during day and edited the light on the computers. This was not our only problem, our sound effects went very wrong at one point, the character Max played by Jacob was meant to have some dialogue but the equipment we had couldn't pick up sound from the distance we were from him. We tried to overcome this problem as we had some feedback from classmates and this was the main concern and we tried to dub the sound with somebody else’s voice, this sounded very wrong and we found that our only choice was to have no dialogue in the film. We found that this made the film even harder to read for the audience. Another technical difficulty was tracking. We borrowed a 'dolly' from school but the road surface we were using was far too unstable for the dolly to move along it smoothly. We had to improvise by using a hand held camera method which I think turned out looking quite professional.

One of the easier parts of making the film was the film shoot, working out the shot types was something that we found easy, creating tension from the shots we used, for instance the pan when Claudia is leaving her house an walks towards the camera, I wanted the audience to be looking at Claudia’s legs and being reminded that she is an “uptown” type of girl with class. I also wanted them to be thinking about where she is going and who she is meeting. We hoped that this would create suspense in our film.

A very important part of making our film was the mise en scene, everything that was in the shots, including both setting and costume, we kept the setting simple using real houses making it as realistic as possible, we gave Claudia a very important prop, the record player which I felt played a huge part in her characterisation, finding out the type of person she is, it shows she is an old fashioned kind of girl, not somebody who would just shove on the radio, we wanted her to be the kind of person who spend time deciding on what music she wanted to listen to, somebody who is upper-class, her costume represents her social class, she wears the simple black dress with red lipstick, a classic look that most people would recognise as “the date look”. We wanted the audience to be able to relate to her, most girls would understand the way she was getting ready for her date. We hoped this would attract the audience into wanted to watch more of the film as they wanted to know more about this character. Jacob has the same classy look but with a horrible twist, he places a knife into his pocket, this denotes danger, the dagger shot is so fast that it is hard for the audience to catch it, I think that this is good because when he hold the knife out towards Claudia at the end the audience will realise and remember. Jacob is a very complex character and we wanted to get the audience very interested in him but not giving to much away. We wanted to inform the audience that this man is dangerous but at the same time very mysterious.


The target audience for our film has a very wide range; the film is definitely for over 18's as I believe that the film would get very violent later on with the murder of Claudia. However the film is sophisticated at the same time, so the target audience would be for adults aged 30 onwards. I think we attracted our audience by making the film sophisticated like our characters and by making the characters easy to relate to.

Music was one of the biggest issues we had during the production of our film, it was the cause of many arguments between me and Helena, if we used the wrong piece of music the suspense becomes all wrong, in my opinion I believe that this is what happened, the first piece of music is to upbeat but does create a good contrast to the second piece which I think would be better as a much simpler piece, just a heart beat or one instrument on its own such as a violin. Despite this I do think that overall our film is very good and it works and is understandable, which is something that is vital to make the film successful.
The media institution that I would want to produce my film would be channel 4/ Film 4 I think that it would make the film feel more personal to be produced by a British film company.

Lizzy Morey
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