Strangling Scene Change

In the end of our video, it is imperative that the main character has to strangle the girlfriend/drug, which is going to symbolise how he will have finally beaten his drug addiction. In our rough cut, this seemed to get quite a confused response from people who weren't too sure as to what actually happened to the woman, whether she had been killed or just vanished into thin air. This most certainly wasn't our intention.

To change this, we have been researching music videos which have had a strangling scene in it and we found that the video video for the song, 'Spacebound' by Eminem to be extremely useful as there is an effect in it which we would like to achieve in our video. As Eminem's character appears to kill a woman with his bare hands, the editing used shows the woman being strangled, however, by crosscutting between two shots, one with the woman and one without. This shows both the perspective of him and reality which works really well with the video's narrative. If we could do something similar to that, we could really make this scene not just emotive, but shocking and impressive.

This is what our rough-cut strangling scene looked like. As you might imagine, getting Orrin to strangle his girlfriend proved to be quite difficult as we wanted it to look realistic without him actually causing her any harm. Fortunately, they achieved this with Laura pretty much unscathed.

We also want our strangling scene to be much more brutal and terrifying which this Eminem video carried out effectively because currently, the clips in the rough cut seem rather staged. With a bit more practice I think we can get the right levels of anger and fear in our actors to make this scene really realistic and uncomfortable to the viewer. This is the scene in our video that gives away what the whole narrative has been about really clearly so this has to be exactly how we want it otherwise it may not be as obvious as we need it to be without there being any confusion for the viewer whatsoever.
Therefore we will be sure to film Orrin strangling Laura, but also film him strangling nobody. When we come to edit we will experiment with which clips we use to see whether the clips of him strangling no one are imperative or if the story makes sense without it.