The Murder

Our whole short film is based around the murder scene near the end of the film. We wanted to make this really good because it was so importnt to the story line. After a while of thinkning of different ways pf doing it and then trying to figure out how we would do it we found a video on YouTube by this channel calle FilmRiot. The video basically showed us a way that we were able to smash somebodys head with a baseball bat and a melon and make it look realistic with the skull and blood splattering eveywhere. We thought about this idea and thought that the idea would still work if we used a sledgehammer. The video below is the tutorial video that FilmRiot put up so that we could learn to use it.



On this tutorial video it says after you have got all of the footage then you need to know how to use the Adobe software called After Effects. We would need to know how to use this because this is how you make it look like the head is exploding by using the meon footage and masking it so tht the explosion matches the reaction of the actor. We researched after effects and also had a very quick look on our school computers and reaslied that the whole process was going to take a lot of our time nd it was going to take a lot of failed attempts to actually master this effect. So before we actually went out to give the idea a go we thought we should do a trial run of the melon smash.

We then went out and bought a melon. We took it back to Harry's house and chopped the top of it so that we could pull out all of the inside of the melon as the Film Riot video says and filled it with some fake blood. Chopping the top of it off was easy and so was taking out all of the insides but when we wanted to take the melon out to go and film the top needed to be taped on because all of the fake blood inside was then running out of the edges so we needed to tape it up some how. The picture underneath shows us taking out the insides. Also for this part as I said you need to fill the melon with fake blood. Neither of us had any fake blood at home and we didnt really have time or we didnt want to have to go out and buy any so in the end we made some using cornflour, red food colouring and just some warm watter. I think that this came out really and we and looked really effecive with the melon smash.

So for the trial run we didnt see the need in going all the way up to the murder scene as we were not going to use this footage in our actual film. Instead we just went up onto a part of the moors which was very open to do it on. Below is the actual footage that we got after we had filmed it all and tried to use after effects on it. As you can see this isnt the best effect but I think from a first effort it was good progress towards when we do it for real.