By Emily Waters, Riley Collins Dobricic, Ethan Reid and Charlotte Thomas
In collaboration with the AFI Research Collection, our group adapted the original Crime Club script ‘A Case of Suicide’. This final work is inspired by the 1960s Australian show ‘Homicide’ and is reminiscent of true crime media works from this era. Audiences follow detective Fuller interrogate Mr. Trotter about his wife’s sudden and supposed suicide. The audience discover the truth, was this a case of suicide or not?
Riley: For our project Open Case we reimagined the crime club script a case of suicide into a homicide-esque T.V. episode, following the story of Mr. Trotter and how he got away with murdering his wife and framing it as suicide. My role in the production was editing, I chose sound effects, music and dubbed audio to match the work and sourced found footage for the intro and outro sequences as well, I also colour-graded and added a grain filter to clips we recorded to keep in line with our intended style. From doing this I got to expand my editing skills and edit for a new style (being T.V) which I hadn’t done before.
Charlotte: For this project I was cinematographer and assistant editor my main focus was capturing the emotions in the scene with framing of the actors and using a range of shot types to use visual means in order to convey the narrative. I assisted Riely in editing by putting the shots in their proper order in the beginning so it was easier for her to do the assembly edit, making the logo for our episode and just giving her feedback whenever she needed it while editing particularly in colour grading the flashback scenes
Ethan: The most involvement I had in the project was acting in the final video and recording voiceovers and narration. I had some written material for the script, however this was discarded
Emily: I wrote the script for our final work. A key concern of the studio is adapting an old script for contemporary audiences. Therefore, I watched an episode of Homicide, which our final work is inspired by. I also read the original script many times in order to capture Eve, Detective Fuller and Mr. Trotter’s language and expressions. My hope for the final work is that it is truly reminiscent of a 1970s Homicide episode, and that we captured the nostalgia that our intended audience will experience whilst watching the video.