As scriptwriter and producer, it was my responsibility to polish the script, find locations and source props for our filming.

During the production process, I was able to develop my planning and product management skills. To begin with, I constantly pushed brainstorming and discussion sessions in our team to make su re that we were making continued progress. Whenever a team member was absent, I always updated him on the new ideas and progress which we made during the day, so that everyone stayed informed and on track. As a result, we started filming early to produce a rough draft, and this extra round of filming gave us the feedback required to make alterations and improve the overall production quality of our project.

As a student production group, my main focus regarding the plot was to be realistic. Considering the limited resources at our disposal, producing a thriller film was suitable for our time & budget. Similarly, it was my responsibility to source the locations for our shoot. When I joined the group, I voted against using the original idea of a top-of-building scene since it would be complicated to arrange and might produce unnecessary safety hazards. Because we were in school at the time of filming, setting the main event of the opening in school would be convenient to arrange. I also decided to film the home scenes at Bobby’s home, and utilised my family’s hatchback car to film the car scenes.

Since we were filming in our homes, I made sure that we removed any distractive influences (e.g. entertainment & electronic devices) during filming so that we can complete filming with high efficiency. My goal-oriented focus allowed us to finish planning and filming much earlier than required, which gave us plenty of time to make adjustments and improve the quality of our opening through editing.

Group discussions also helped me discern between good ideas and mediocre ideas. I found it important to explore a wide range of topics during discussions, even topics that were only slightly related to our current ideas. This created great chemistry within the team, for example, we decided to name our film ‘the pitch’ and place the setting of the main event within an elevator because of the idea of an ‘elevator pitch’ which we had to present to our class. Building upon ideas on the fly was important because it helped us assemble an interesting story.

As the manager of our project, it was also important to be decisive and flexible when changes are required. We originally intended to use a prop gun to create dramatic tension, but later we found out that law regulations in China forbids civilians from owning firearm-shaped objects. This made it highly difficult for us to film a gun scene, and through watching film openings from earlier media students, I found that unrealistic props would drastically hinder the atmospheric tension in thriller films. I didn’t want to use a children’s toy as substitute, so I decided to find a close replacement that would also create strong dramatic tension. I considered using a kitchen knife, but filming a handover scene with it might create unnecessary safety hazards, so I settled on a red baseball bat, which had the implication of violence and was safely available for filming.