The City - Hunting down the Babadook…

Bringing everything together for the final performance of ‘The City’, my group and I were tasked to venture out into the streets of Sheffield to choose a location for our storyline to take place! Sticking with a few rules in our filming, every group in my class had to choose a contrasting location to fit the style of our filming and to wear appropriate costumes for each character. As well as this, we were tasked to create a seamless transition with the groups before and after us. 

My group of four teamed up with the group before us on the filming day as the atmosphere of mystery and genre of thriller stood out in their piece like ours. Keeping the content of the victim being hunted down by the noir-styled killer, I thought of creating the seamless transition with one of the killers from the group before bumping into our victim. 

Prior to the filming day, my class and I watch snippets from the popular Netflix series ‘Adolescence’ to visualise the camera having no cuts whatsoever! This helped me in thinking how our transitions can be smooth to almost replicate the camera having no cuts. 

In terms of the ending transition, my police character and my peer run up to the getaway car with the camera following behind us to get in the car as well, like a POV shot! The camera zooms in on the blue jeans to then lead onto the next groups, they zoom out from a blue dressing gown belt!

Taking in my tutor’s feedback of including more costume in out final piece, I ordered two police hats, black classic aviators, and two police pin badges. Pairing these with all an all-black outfit made myself stand out with the greenery location around us. In doing this, it helped me with my affirmative characterisation and using more exaggerated body language to add an element of comedy.

After filming, I took on the main roll of editing – adding on filters of grey and producing music behind the camera shots! I feel as though the music especially helped set the eerie tone, balancing it out with the outside ambience to not overpower the natural sound. I intended to keep moments of the natural noise and elements of silence to emphasise the suspense of the Babadook getting closer but even including a reoccurring motif of our killer getting closer to both the victim and the police officers, adding more onto the comedic effect!

My tutor then invited us to revisit the graveyard space and write down at least ten sentences to describe what we can see or hear to create a series of black cards in our editing. Adding them onto my piece, I originally included a few with applying an old TV glitching effect to highlight the Noir and mysterious style, but took them off in my final editing as I feel as though they took up most of the timing.

Our last task was to perform this live to an audience, with our films played on a projection screen as each group would enter the stage and read an AI-generated mix of every group’s black cards. Running with the theme of mystery over everyone’s piece – and with the holiday of Halloween coming up – we were instructed to think of how our characters would fall to their death on the floor after reading out the cards fully. I wore ripped jeans with fake blood on my face, arms and legs, putting bruises and cuts on my face too! This resembled my character’s death by the Babadook – being quite brutal…

Overall, The City has been overall enjoyable and I hope to create similar projects within my future work! A strength of mine was thinking about the element of costume, as I found that this aspect brings out character’s performance more in terms of characterisation. One thing I would like to work on is holding the phone’s camera more, as I found this challenging when keeping the phone steady and not letting anything get in the camera’s way.

Reference: Adolescene, 2025, TV series: https://youtu.be/HG9XUSnK9g8?si=orNLfYCNbDudv-8F