Key Moments Of Our Narrative

There were many crucial moments in the narrative of our video which helped in the reveal of our plot twist at the end. We chose many of these because of the rough cut audience, who revealed that there wasn't enough indication to the actual plot of her not being real.  Here are some of these moments -

The Drug Deal

In this scene, our male character approaches a drug dealer and hands him some money. We used an insert to show a close up of the money being transferred. We do see the drug dealer hand our male character something but it isn't made clear what, however it can be easily read as him receiving drugs. The next clip we see of the narrative is the main characters hand being grabbed by the female character. We made sure that the hand she holds is the same hand he receives the drugs with. This is obviously meant to show her (the drug) being given to him. 

The Temptress' Control

We made sure to include lots of scenes where 'the drug' is controlling the male character. This is especially shown when she pulls him down a dark back alley and we see him following her. We also made sure in the kissing scenes that she is pulling him in. We directed our actors in this way so we could present our male character as being totally under the control of the drug, inferring that his addiction has taken over him.

The Lighter Scene

In the scene with the lighter, it is very dark with the flame being the only source of light. We see two shots of just the lighter, and when the final shot appears, it seems to again be just the flame, however the female character becomes clear as she moves into the light and then blows out the flame. The battle of addiction and sobriety represents a battle between dark and light happening within our male character. The drug blowing out the flame represents her dismissing the light. Therefore the dark (the addiction to drugs) wins. 

The Broken Man

In this shot we chose to use a broken mirror. This is because as his reflection comes into focus we see that its is distorted and cracked due to the broken mirror. It shows that although he looks fine on the outside, inside he is broken due to the constant battle with the addiction. This indicates that when reflecting on himself, he knows that he is broken inside but does not want to accept it.

 He Can't Get Rid Of Her

In this scene we tried to show our male character having a 'bad trip'.  We did this by showing discomfort through close ups of his face and we also used a POV shot of him looking at the female character and she appears blurry and fuzzy, showing that he has taken too many drugs.  He then shoves her out of his room in an attempt to stop the drug from making him feel any worse.  Nevertheless, as he turns around the audience can see that she is still in the room.  This was the first real moment where the audience can infer that she may not be real, because as long as he is feeling the effects of the drug, he can't get away from her.

The Club And Relapse Scene

In this scene the main character is seen going to a club with his friend.  Once he is inside, he gets a drink and looks to his side to see 'her' looking back at him.  He instantly looks away.  The fact that he turns away from her and that they are not actually interacting shows that he hasn't yet taken any drugs however is being tempted to take some. He proceeds to drink shot after shot thinking it may diminish the need to take drugs however it makes him more weak and vulnerable. When he slams his last shot glass down, the video starts to go in slow motion and we used a POV shot to show that when he lifts his head, he can see her again and everything else is blurred out.  We also added a high pitched sound of tinnitus to create an uneasy feel for the audience.  She walks away but turns and directs him to follow her.  He finally gives in to his temptation and follows her into the toilet.  When they start kissing in the toilet this represents him taking the drugs. Shorty after this however, we see him get angry and agitated at himself and her, so runs away. 

The Killing Scene/Conquering His Addiction

We see him running from what appears to be complete darkness into the light of the tunnel. This hints at him choosing light over dark and foreshadows him choosing to get rid of the drug addiction all together. We see her approach in a series of jump cuts where she seems to just appear. She then starts trying to get his attention and for him to look at her but he pushes her off of him and they stand up face to face. This intense moment where they stare at each shows the final battle of her control now that he has found the power to get rid of her.

He then quickly slams her against the wall by her throat and proceeds to strangle her.  At first the audience may feel that this is very violent however we used parallel editing to show our main character also tidying up his life by cleaning his disgustingly messy room and getting rid of all of his empty alcohol bottles. In the final shot of him killing her when we see him slam her head against the wall, we also see him flushing his drugs down the toilet, which is a key shot to explain that he doesn't actually kill her but kills his addiction.  Because he has tidied up his room and flushed his drugs down the toilet, whilst at the same time showing that he has 'killed' her.  The audience realise that he is effectively conquering his drug addiction and finally removing her from his life.

Just to further remove any confusion as to what exactly the female was, our main character looks down to the floor of where he just strangled her and walks away.  The camera doesn't follow him and instead stays in the same position, then pans down towards the floor where the audience would expect to see her lying.  However, this is where the audience would completely understand what the female was representing, as there is absolutely nothing on the floor where she should be lying dead.  This concludes that he did not just murder someone, he simply 'murdered' his drug addiction and she was never real in the first place, just a figment of his imagination, a metaphor for what a drug addiction can feel like.  This links to our initial idea for the whole video, the old saying that 'love is a drug'.  By this we mean that drug addictions can, in many ways, be very similar to the addictive prospect of love, and therefore very difficult to get over.

To conclude, we used many of the shots above because in our rough cut feedback, one of our issues was that the audience didn't fully understand the narrative and were slightly confused as to whether she was or wasn't real,  or whether they were just in a rather abusive relationship.  Some people even thought we were making our main character out to be evil by killing his girlfriend at the end of the video because he was insane.  But after improving on the rough cuts and using the shots above, our narrative became completely clear.