Props for Filming and Anchoring the Diegesis: Killer Next Door

In order to anchor the diegesis of my trailer I used props to make the plot line clearer and more realistic. 

First of all, I needed to get across the fact that the male character is the killer. In order to do this effectively and efficiently without blatantly using dialogue to express this, I used inter-textuality. I made a fake newspaper by copying and pasting a murder case onto a page and added a headline and date to make it seem more realistic. I placed this in the house of the victim and as I panned across this prop it foreboded to the audience that not only was the male character a killer but that the victim was in danger of coming across him. 

For the gory scenes in my trailer I made fake blood out of honey, glycerine and red and black food colouring. This was made to look like real blood when placed on other props I used such as smearing it on knives, the killers hands and the walls of the killers basement. I also dirtied up some old t-shirts, one of them I placed in the killers bag of weapons to look like a rag which he uses to clean his weapons. The other t-shirt I made the victim wear in the chase scene through the woods as I had rubbed it with dirt and fake blood to look like she was cut and bruised when she had fallen whilst running away from the killer.

 

Another way which I anchored the diegesis was by taking real photographs of my female actor with her and her parents through out her life time. I placed these around the house and produced shots of them in my trailer. These shots of the photos were shown when the female protagonist was listening to a voicemail her mother had left on the answer machine. This helped the audience understand that the female protagonist did in fact live with her parents but they were not present in the house that day. I also used a voice over of a radio news anchor along with the physical prop of a radio to again convey the plot line clearly  The news anchor spoke of a "murder on the move" just like the newspaper expressed. This was another way in which the plot was anchored through the use of props. 

The last from of prop which I used was photographs of the victim and her house, this added to the effect of a stalker vibe to the killer and resultantly made it much more eerie.