Our short film adaptation of Homicide: Starring Joan Kendall reinterprets the original synopsis, focusing on Joan’s character driven perspective. Rather than centre the narrative on a police investigation, we chose to frame the story around Joan Kendall and her subjective account in the dark interrogation room. This shift allows us creative freedom to build a focus on her emotional state, personal life, and the fractures in her relationship to her husband that led to the murder of her husband.

Without access to the script, our narrative is constructed to blend Joan’s warm, stylised recollection of her home life with darker tones and shifting emotions. We will use b-roll to visualise her memories and soft muted colours to reveal the tension the morning of the incident. Our intention is to present Joan as someone to sympathise with but also suspicious and not to be trusted, encouraging audiences to question how her narrative shapes the perception of truth.

By focusing on Joan’s point of view, the film uses themes of agency, emotional absence and narrative reliability. We are interested in portraying a female protagonist whose motives are complex and have underlying meaning. Audiences can understand the weight of her actions while finding Joan to be unreliable.

When adapting this episode, we were challenged to engage to contemporary questions around gender and morality and how our trust in authority has changed over time.

As Linda Hutcheon recognises, adaptation is a form of repetition without replication, a double process of interpreting and then creating (Hutcheon, 2012, p.33).  This idea supports our work in the way we interpret the synopsis and reframe it through a different perspective. Creating a new story that stays connected but does not replicate the original.

A4 Pre Production Folder Alisha Jess and James

REFERENCES

Hutcheon, L. (2012), A Theory of Adaptation. Taylor & Francis Group. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=1016075