Our shots are similar to or inspired by different aspects of mystery films, but we’ve taken a lot of inspiration from our two favorite mystery films (and the ones we are relying on the most), Murder On the Orient Express, both the 1974 and the 2017 version. We also had some planned shots/takes from the title sequence of Crooked House, but I’ll go into that a little bit later.
1974 MOTOE 
1974 MOTOE
Inspo 
Inspo
The shots of our evidence comes from the opening to the original from 1974. While the color correcting isn’t completely done, we want a darker lit feel to the evidence so it looks and feels more mysterious. That’s the whole idea of a murder mystery anyway. The 1974 version showed the crime actually taking place, or the background of another crime anyway, while ours shows the aftermath of our victim being slain. We’ve ultimately decided the blue hue wouldn’t make the scene as sinister as we want it to be, even with the music. It would give the scene less of the creepy and shock factor than what we would want. The scene with the evidence is following a lot of our thriller conventions, and mystery as well with the unknown factor of who is observing the evidence, is it a detective? a policeman? the killer coming back to move the evidence? The audience has no idea.
Inspo 
Inspo
2017 
2017
The long shot at the beginning is also inspired from different shots of the crime scene happening in the original Murder On the Orient Express, since you saw many different things happening in just one shot. While there are multiple shots like this in their sequence, we only have one sort of establishing shot like that so we wouldn’t run out of time in that sort of way. The second part of the sequence with the dialogue between the two detectives is inspired by the scene in the beginning of the 2017 Murder On the Orient Express where you see the detective (his actions indicate that he is one) conversing with different minor characters as they bring him food, run errands for him, etc. This not only pushes along a small narrative, it also introduces the detective in a subtle way as well. Our plot for our female detective, Rebecca Conn, converses with her superior, the male detective, Tommy Wolff. Through the use of dialogue and certain blocking aspects, we made sure to show the audience that Rebecca was in fact a detective. We thought of this idea from others watching our film, and we are glad we did since we would not have thought of that ourselves.
We also had a trial and error shot where we decided to try and do one long take of observing the evidence as Crooked House had the same sort of thing, but after looking through editing and post-production, it would’ve been too long since we wanted to include a lot of different stuff with our sequence with our dialogue and what not, so it was a better and more mysterious choice on our part to go with the dissolving into one another rather than the one long take, even though I personally thought it looked pretty cool, but alas Cambridge restricts us once more.
Into The Truth 