Preperation

Our group worked very hard on the preparation for our Media Thriller. Due to the fact we had a lot of mise en scene we had to work very hard to prepare everything and get everything organized on time for our shoot. We spent a huge amount of our free time organizing things. We spent hours in the photography lab printing loads of pictures for the office set, we had many visits to the technicians room in the theatre department to see if the had the props we needed. Also we phoned various costume stores to find the right Marilyn Monroe dress for the 50s film set scene and after many failed attempts we found out that there was a costume department here at school so we made an appointment with one of the technicians and he took us to the costumes department. Luckily we managed to find a very close match to the dress we were looking for, also we got lots of 50s jackets for the film crew and black suits for the dancers. After being unsuccessful at finding a 50s camera Gabby and I decided to get lots unused cardboard from the kitchen and make a 50s camera of our own by taping two half boxes together and cutting out two massive circles to act as film reels. We also made 9 hearts for the dancers so that they would match the dancers from the real video of ‘Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend’. We constructed the camera, cut out 9 hearts from very tough cardboard and then painted them all the correct colours.

Monroe Thriller Idea Power Point

O:\Media Photos\Marilyn Monroe

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Set Sketch for 50s film set scene

This is a set sketch of our 50s film set. In this set the idea is that we are in the set of the video shoot of Marilyn Monroe's 'Diamonds Are a Girl Best Friend' and when we track out of the shot a 50s film set is revealed.

Prop List and Costume List

Marilyn Monroe Prop List

Office Set:
• Posters of Marilyn
• Pictures of Marilyn
• Documents
• Ash tray
• Desk light
• 4 television monitors
• Laptop
• Bin
• Lots of paper (crunched up bits as well)
• Pencil pot with pencils and pens
• Old newspapers

Show Set:
• Black round tables
• Directors chairs
• Sound boom mic
• Loudspeaker
• 9 love hearts 30 cm high (provided by students)
• Black fan
• Clipboards
• Mugs
• Make-up
• 50’s camera
• Clapper board




Marilyn Monroe Costume

Show Scene

Marilyn Monroe:
• Marilyn Monroe Pink Dress
• Pink elbow length gloves
• Diamond necklace, earrings and bracelets
• Blonde short curly haired wig

Dancers:
• 9 black suits
• 9 pink sashes
• 9 white bowties

Crew:
• 5 Trilby Hats
• 16 Coloured suits (not black)

Set Sketch for the Office Scene

This is a set sketch for the office scene, the idea was to have it completely filled with pictures and documents of Marilyn Monroe. This would indicate that somebody was investigating her life and has clearly spent a lot of time and effort in doing so.

Storyboarding the Idea

These were our storyboarding sketches and outlines.

Research

The group looked into many of Marilyn's videos, movie and pictures. We also all looked into her on the internet and researched her death. It was extremely interesting researching Marilyn Monroe and it was almost as if we were investigating her death ourselves. We watched many conspiracy videos and looked at many news articles. This gave us all a feel of what we were doing and got us all really involved in the idea. We learnt a lot about her life and we managed to get some really interesting photos and documents to put into our shoot. It also helped us get some interesting facts to shape our thriller idea.

Above is the first in a series of videos we watched on youtube about all the conspiracy theories about Marilyn's death.

The Final Idea

In the beginning the group chose my idea but after discussing the idea with the media guys who were going through whether our ideas would work or not we realized the idea would be quite impractical to shoot. So in the end our group decided to go with Gabby's idea this is because our group really liked the idea and also the idea would already have a viewing market as there are already fans of Marilyn Monroe so they would be interested in seeing the movie no doubt.

Her idea is focused on the conspiracy of Marilyn Monroe's death and whether or not she was murdered. It focuses on this guy who is investigating her death and trying to figure out what happened to her. He tries to figure out weather the Kennedy brothers where responsible, weather Marilyn was pregnant with a Kennedy love child and also how or if she was murdered.

So as a group we came up with the idea to have an office set, the office would be covered in documents about Marilyn and loads of photos and pictures of her. There would be roughly 4 monitors scattered around the room and on these monitors would be videos of Marilyn in her glory and also videos of her funeral. This office would portray that somebody is studying her life and therefore imply to the audience that the movie will focus on the investigation of Monroe's death. Then the second part of the video sequence would involve the camera zooming into one of the monitors which would be showing Monroe’s ‘Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend’ video. The camera would continue to zoom in and eventually we would be in the actual 50s set of the movie. We would let the song run for a bit and slowly zoom out of the set to show the 50s film crew. A director would then shout ‘Cut!’ and the sequence would end.