Children of Men: Primary school scene

While still in debate over what location we should use for shooting our trailer, I decided to research the primary school scene from children of men to see how the location of an abandoned school was used in a film. At this point, we see the three main characters fleeing and seeing them wake up at an abandoned primary school.

From the pictures above, you can see it was more content with pictures by the front of the school showing the teachers. Yet 10 + years down the line, you see graffiti all over the walls which could show how much Britain has changed over the past years and also the sense of violence within the country and shows childless dystopia which is the main point of the film.

Also, the colours within these pictures show of many colours but then the graffiti on the walls is of specific colours of black and red, could this symbolise how we are in much more danger than we were in before? Something like drawing graffiti on the walls if we use the abandoned school could be effective in the sense that the school is a place of urban exploitations.

We then enter an empty classroom which still has resources in the room with writing still on the blackboards – this is very similar to one of the classrooms we had found when looking at the abandoned school. Although our trailer will be in a different context and genre compared to this classroom in children of men, it shows that resources and writing on the blackboards still in the room can be linked the context of the film (children of men - there are no primary school children left to teach, our film – teachers/old students come back to life/haunt the school).        

We are then shown a pan back to the right side of the classroom where you can see the window glass shattered and the symbol of the film (the teardrop) with Kee positioned inside the teardrop. This may not be fully relevant to the research the of the location but it is important in terms of getting the little details of all our trailer correct. The director deliberately positioned the character so when the pan of Miriam walked up to talked to Theo, you could see Kee perfectly positioned. As the teardrop was shown in the poster of the film, it obviously symbolises the importance of Kee within the film and if we were to doing something like in our trailer, it could be effective as it would reveal a little bit of the plot & showing the importance but not showing too much of the storyline.