LO1.2: Proposal

Purpose 

The purpose of this short film is to entertain and to show the audience the irony of today's society how you never really know who will end up being part of the LGBTQ+ community and who will not be. This story also shows the saying of ‘don't judge a book by its cover’ for the female stereotypically view of how women are the ones that are obsessed with the idea of finding their true love and the stereotypical view of love at first sight.  

Form and genre 

This short film is going to be between 5 and 10 minutes in length, with its style being social realism, this means that all events and emotion will be genuine and not overexaggerated. This is so that the audience may empathise with the characters easier which will draw them into the plot and the story. Since this is a short film, its narrative will be quite simple as to not confuse the audience, it also allows the story to be fluid and move at the correct pace, with not too much information in each scene nor is the plot rushed, this will result in a much cleaner short film compared to if it was rushed and fast paced. Moreover, as this is in the romance genre, it will display stereotypical views associated with the genre, in this case it will be a woman finding her “true love,” however it also will challenge these views with modernistic ideas on romance, in this case instead of love being between a man and a woman, it can be as a homosexual relationship as we will see at the ending as the man will be revealed as gay. Moreover, we will also use colour to connote romance, this is through the colour red, however it will have a split connotation as red can be associated with the idea of love, romance, and lust, but it also can be associated with blood, which could symbolise the heartbreak and pain when you lose someone you love. 

Content 

For this short film, we still be constructing a short narrative on a girl who falls in love with a guy who she sees while she is getting a coffee. She will then rush home to tell her friends and family, this will be done in long takes to capture as much natural emotion and feeling as possible to make this seem as realistic as possible. From this it will slow down and add a motion blur and light filter to soften the shots edges, from this it will blur into quick shots with light contrast and a red-light filter, this is to remind the audience of how this narrative began and shows a form of dream state. The red filter will be a visual representation of her love for the boy, the quick takes will be to show her imagining all her life with him flashing in her mind. Gradually the screen will gain increasingly red to show a visual metaphor for her love growing even more, it will also be used as a match cut for cutting to the next day and back to the red light in traffic. After she will proceed to follow the boy to talk and confess her feelings, this will be done in quick shots to portray the desperation and energy within the scene, however the plot will take a twist as the man turns out to be gay as she sees him walk up to his boyfriend and holds him to walk off. This will be a shock and we will capture this as an extreme closeup of her eye and the shot of the man is in her eyes reflection so we see what she is seeing, it also will be used to capture a tear before instantly cutting to black and the credits, for these moments the film will be silent to draw all attention to the reflection as if shot wrong, the audience may be distracted from the valuable information. 

Target audience 

The demographics for our film will be for ages 17–25-year-olds of both male and females, however more females as stereotypically females watch more romantic films because females are more emotional and connect more with a romance film than what a typical male audience would. The psychographic of this film would be mainstreamers and aspirers. These categories, especially aspirers, normally seek attention and want to relate to things that happen in films, especially in a romantic one. Mainstreamers also would watch this film as they would follow the latest trends and new releases, which would be our film, because it will be a new release and will hopefully be well known and something which our specific target audience would want to watch. Majority of the audience for our film would have a social grade of C1, C2 and D, this is because these groups of people are either young adults who are either in education or do not have a job which takes up all their time. However, all 3 of these social grades would have access to a device in which they could watch the film on as they would either be student who currently live at home or have a well enough paid job to afford to move out but not a job that takes up all their time. Despite, not all ethnicity's and sexuality's being shown in this film, our film will still appeal to all groups as this can happen to any race, sexuality, or gender.  

Resources and personnel  

In this short film project, the team all has distinct roles to produce the film, for example Kaley Clark has the role of director and script writer, Emily Bairstow has the roles of sound editor and organizer including call sheets, Charlie Mitchell has the job roles of main camera man and set designer, Ben Dyer has the job roles of main editor and storyboard creator. From all these job roles being considered we have decided to give certain people job roles that match their skills, for example Ben Dyer likes to edit and specialises in it so he then makes a good fit to be the main editor. The software that we will be using to create and edit this short film will be Adobe Premier Pro, Adobe audition and Adobe After Effects. These software materials will be used for they are all necessary for certain aspects of the film such as Adobe Premier Pro would be used to then edit all the footage and add to audio/background sounds to the footage to make it into the short film. Adobe audition will be used to edit the audio so the pitch and tempo of the video can be edited so that the footage is more interesting and entertaining for the audience. Adobe After Effects will be used to add any special effects to the short film that would be needed to add to the narrative of the short film. Some of the hardware materials that we would be using to film and create the short film will be using cameras to film the footage and then store it on an SD card, tripods to get more of a steady and controlled camera angle and to get the footage from different heights depending on the content. To gather clear footage for the short film there will have to be lighting used to make sure that the characters are seen clearly creating a more professional view on the short film. To edit the footage, we would also need to use a computer, mouse, and keyboard, to listen to the footage we would have to use headphones to then check if the use of the external microphone is working as we want it to. To film any establishing shots, we will have to use the jib or a drone and to create the storyboards and visual effects we will be using a graphics tablet.  

Distribution and marketing methods 

As a team of up-and-coming filmmakers, we have thought many places we can distribute our film such as BFI London Film Festival or the Latitude Film Festival. These places would link to our target audience because the audience that would go to these festivals are people wanting to watch films that were mad by young people like us. Furthermore, other places we could distribute our products to included websites like YouTube. Linking back to our psychographics for this film, being mainstreamers, YouTube is a website actively used by the mainstreamer and it is another source of content that is also actively accessed by 17–25-year-olds of all genders. Another place where people could access our film would be Instagram TV, this would be a good place to distribute because of the age group we are targeting our product towards and with our main psychographic being mainstreamer and Instagram is a mainstream product. As for marketing, we want to focus more on below the line advertising with some above the line methods. The above methods we are wanting to focus is releasing a short teaser trailer for our short film on a platform like Instagram, this would be effective because given our demographics age and psychographic we know that they are more likely to use social media more than they would be likely to see it on normal television.  

Settings  

We will be drowning out noise in the background, motion and what she is doing to convey a natural routine and habits the main reason we would be do this is because it gives a natural feel to this film. So, the film feels like this the shots where we look at background are to do with significant places or places that are repeated, the mirror street and the table at the jazz café The settings that we will be using in our short film would be the change in the lighting for example there will be lower light temperatures to create a warmer connotation and atmosphere to the film, this will further add to the genre of the film. To make to main characters more visible during the short film we will be blurring the background, this will make the viewers focus stay on the main character. The main frame rate we will be using is 30 FPS as this is the best thing to use when filming in this genre and it is also the most common one when filming. When focusing on the main character we want to use a smaller aperture, somewhere around f/1.8 or f/4. If we want the main the focus to be our character and what they are doing, then the best shutter speed would be 1/125 since it meets in the middle in terms of speed and the amount of light, we let in.