Research And Details of Examples Of Influences For Our Film

The Lovely Bones:

Narration: Much of our influence for our film came from the ideas presented in The Lovely Bones. The first element of the film which influenced ours was the Narration. Susie is the omniscient narrator throughout the film, explaining her thoughts and feelings as to what was going on after she passed on to the afterlife. This enables the audience to know the character on a more personal level, which creates empathy within the audience. Although our main character does not narrate the film, the ending of the film is narrated by our lead characters boyfriend. His thoughts and feelings on the struggle he is facing coping with her death are shared as he reads out a message he sent to her mobile phone, despite her being dead. This allows us to sum up all the complicated parts of the story and hide any mystery that was experienced at the beginning of the film, to finalise the plot. Although we are not getting an insight of Lola's feelings directly, we can clearly see due to Danny's narration how her death has effected the people around her.

The Afterlife/Spirits: We loved the unique way in which the main character in the Lovely Bones, was no longer actually alive. We felt that this would be a dramatic turn of event for our film. So rather than informing the audience that our character was dead from the beginning, this isn't clarified until the very end. However throughout our film, we hint several times that she may be dead. For example. when the two girls see the accident scene. Nobody knows what happens when you die, and everybody has different interpretations of it. This is why we thought this would be an interesting story line for our film.

Misfits: Series: 2 Episode: 2

Death Of A Loved One: This is where we got our idea of saving the concept of Lola being dead until the very end. In this episode of Misfits, Nathan meets his long last brother. They both discover one thing in common: their dad never bothered with either of them. Although Nathan felt that it was too late to set things right between him and his dad, he wanted to see if he could sort out the relationship between his dad and younger brother. When he takes Jamie (his brother) around to their dads house, Nathans dad tell him that Jamie is dead. We felt that this plot twist was very dramatic and emotional, so we wanted to incorporate it into our own film. (Watch video from 1:40 onwards)

The Sixth Sense:

The Plot Twist: Not only does the audience not know that Lola is dead until the end of the film, Lola doesn't know herself. We got this idea from the movie 'The Sixth Sense'. The movie is about a boy who can see dead people and Bruce Willis' character helps him to deal with it. However, at the end of the movie, Bruce Willis' realises that he himself is dead, and he is the one needing the help to cope with the afterlife. In the case of our film, Lola feels like she has been saved from the accident, when in reality, Hannah is helping her try to cope with her death.