Ideas we have discarded

Changes we have made and ideas we have discarded.

We decided to base our short film of Roald Dahl's short story, Lamb to the slaughter. However we were conscious as to not completely copy the short film put forward by the TV series, "Tales of the unexpected."

We thought it was important to add our own twist onto the story and eventually came up with setting it in modern times, contrasting to the already existing short film which is set in the late 1970's to the early 1980's. However we considered many ideas before settling on this one, we considered changing the murder weapon to a more popular food item that is more commonly seen, such as frozen potato smiley faces, We did not make this change.

We also considered adjusting the characters personalities to being extremely lazy and slobby, and instead of Patrick Maloney offering to cook a home made dinner, he was ordering a take out meal for his wife. However we decided against these ideas as we felt it may ruin the quality of the short film and cause it to come across as cheesy.

However a change we did make to the short story is that we have altered the scene where Mary goes to the market in order to but vegetables and potatoes for the dinner she is to prepare, we decided to change this for practical reasons as we felt it would be hard to convey this accurately and it would be almost impossible to find a shop owner willing to let us film within the shop during trading hours. We instead have made this scene one which involves no dialogue and is very brief.

We also have decided to adapt the scene in which Patrick Maloney kill Mary Maloney, in the original script she kills him after hitting him once with a leg of lamb, however we have decided that after she hits him the first time, he does not die, instead of this he turns around and question what she is doing, only for her to then hit him for a second time, this time, killing him.

Overall our final decision was to stick relatively close to the story line whilst discarding the scene within the food market and also updating it to modern times, this includes adapting the costume, mise en scene, accents and phrasing of the script, as well as this we have also altered it so it takes two hits to kill Patrick Maloney and we also decided to make it even more modern by introducing the idea of gender role reversal, so that it is Patrick Maloney that kills Mary Maloney due to her requesting a divorce rather that the other way around.