I wanted the entire movie to feel as authentic as possible, so I tried to simulate what it would actually look like inside a trunk. We closed the trunk hood just enough for the camera to fit inside so that it would be as dark as possible. What we could not capture on camera because of the light we compensated for in the editing stage by playing around with different image fonts.
We shot the whole film with one camera, so we got the shot of the victim from inside the other car with the window down. To get the other girl’s closeup reaction shot, we stood directly in front of her and gave her an eyeline. I wanted to show how the girls were experiencing this story from different points of view. The other girl had an uneasy gut feeling about the Amber Alert throughout the story—and she and the victim were actually crossing paths. I wanted to convey that you should trust your gut when you feel weird about something, whether that be if you feel unsafe in a certain situation or if you see or hear something that may indicate that someone needs help.
Oh, really? I need to find out about that. In my film, the victim was just banging on the window, but it may have looked like she was giving that signal.
For the piano theme, I just sat down at the piano and started playing around on the keys. I picked out some notes, and when we went into the studio, we ended up using that theme music on the soundtrack. A friend of mine came up with the idea for the heartbeat. And the kidnapper humming to himself—the actor just did that spontaneously while we were filming. I liked it, so we kept it in.
I was so surprised and happy when I won the camera! It has definitely inspired me to do more directing and filmmaking. I may want to use it to shoot a pitch or a pilot to develop Amber into a feature film or a short series.