Response to props, costume and equipment

With the use of props and costumes I believed these must be selected sensitively to correctly convey the atmospheric tension that we're trying to present in the opening of our film and because there will be no dialogue in this opening it is important to get this right as I believe that the props and costumes with be our main way of communicating to our audiences. Props Initially with props, we believed that equipping the antagonist, Danny with a knife will be a suitable thing to as Danny is a borderline psychopath who is intelligent, coordinated and ruthless. However as we further developed our characters I noticed a bit of a discrepancy: we profiled Danny to be intelligent and coordinated however him stalking Sarah is an action fueled by longing and determination for her not through a clear thoughts. Although giving him a knife would show such brash action not be appropriate as a knife signifies death than a threat. So we decided to get rid of the knife as a prop. They keys which Sarah would carry was a carefully chosen prop as it signifies her hope of escaping her stalker, this relates to the audience who are all responsible for their own keys, something that is typically used to open a door to your house which is their safe haven now shown to be Sarah's lifeline and allows them to picture themselves in the same scenario. Costume Danny being dressed in a hoody was an obvious choice as he is supposed to emulate the dangerous, threatening feel, we also discussed whether he should be wearing it zipped or unzipped. This is because we believed that little details presented in the characters would hint bits of the characters' story, zipped up presenting Danny as a mysterious, shrouded man or unzipped presenting a more open individual. Eventually we decided to have him zipped up as this would add mysterious and unnerving feel to a character which the knows so little about. Sarah's costume is a typical normal girl costume to portray how normal the character is, this is so the audience can see her situation as if it was their own lives being snatched away from them when she is kidnapped at the end.