Director of a manuscript

    For this assignment I read the manuscript for the film Heavenly Creatures directed by Peter Jackson. The manuscript was strongly based around a murder by two young girls in nineteen fifties New Zealand. Having been ti New Zealand this past summer, I had heard about the film from people I stayed with, and seen a couple seconds of footage from the film. I had also read up a bit on the story behind the actual murder, but never the film.

If I were to make this film, I would like to focus on being the director of photography. The manuscript contained so much colorful dialogue and thought through the two protagonists. It also had such varying moods in the writing that being able to show these emotions through the lens of the camera is essential.

As Director of Photography, I would focus mainly on color keys of shots, and specifically pushing moods and tones through color. The characters in this story often talk about how life is better, more colorful, more perfect when they are together. It would not be hard to show this by simply bringing highly saturated colors into every scene that contained them both, and then having the shots with them separated be very monotone. In this way I believe the movie would be very clear in it's meaning and story telling. These were two young girls who couldn't stand to be apart and didn't like their home life, and that needs to be shown to push the film along.