Intended Audience

When our group had conceived a basic idea for our short film, we carefully considered who the target audience would be for our product. The brief pitch synopsis covers our initial ideas, and we decided that our genre would most likely be a thriller or mystery, most likely a hybrid of the two. Once our film is completed, it may have been stylized differently to what we originally intended and the genre may be different. But, if our film stays true to our original basic ideas, our target audience would most likely be men aged 15-40. This is quite broad and covers many ages, and evidently people outside of the demographic will see our film as well, but that is our main target audience. Our marketing campaign would be specifically aimed towards males aged 15-40, perhaps with slightly different posters and adverts, one style aimed at potential younger viewers, and the other style aimed at possible older viewers.

In psychographic and demographic terms, our group needs to clearly distinguish the target audience and what type of people would be most interested in our short film. Emulators of society would be a good group to target. These type of people tend to look for role models, and while our film may not supply that, they are vulnerable to advertising, so if our group used posters at bus stops and shopping centres and television adverts in a way that would interest teenagers, it would be more likely that they would pay to see our film, if it was shown somewhere that was accessible and cheap.

Our group believes our film will be mature and raise many issues, meaning that younger viewers may find it a little over their head. This could work to our advantage or it could potentially harm our film’s potential profits, if it were to be released. On the one hand, films with generally more mature audiences, for example ‘Fight Club’ (Dir. David Fincher, 1999) and ‘City Of God’ (Dir. Fernando Meirelles & Katia Lund, 2002), are usually critically received well and transpire to sell extremely well on DVD years after their initial releases. While our film would most likely not have a nationwide release, it could have the potential to sell well on home viewing packages. On the other hand, if our film were to be released and many teenagers went to see it, because it is not aimed at that particular demographic, they might be very disappointed and the film could receive bad word of mouth, ruining potential profits.

Brief Pitch Synopsis

After some careful deliberation, the group began to formulate ideas for a potential five minute production. With ideas successfully circulating, we began to outline a primitive plot. We mutually agreed that amid this design, we needed to develop and nurture our characters in a way that positively anchored and reflected the story at hand. Therefore, character growth is still somewhat vague.

Put somewhat generically, the short film centres around a key protagonist. A man consumed and enveloped by sheer paranoia, potentially inflicted through people around him, or simply the universal pressures of life. To thereby set up a chain of enigmas, we will feature said protagonist deceased within a bath. However, instead of walking down the conventional route of tangible suicide, the target audience at home can question the real source behind his death, whether it be inflicted murder, or what is naturally presented to them-that being suicide.

Once witnesses to the fatality, the audience will then be introduced to another sub-character, a supposed friend of the main protagonist with a constant air of secrecy looming over his persona. This ominous sense of ambiguity should then alarm the target audience at home, with the viewer constantly considering whether this character is behind such heinous crime. I individually feel that a character with such profound effect would work fittingly, as the audience can interact with the film by weighing up the pro’s and con’s of this human being, and judge him on their behalf.

As this particular five minute sequence could potentially follow two opposing climaxes, one being suicide, one being murder, we have developed two juxtaposed endings. The suicide route could potentially feature the sub-character (pyschiatrist) trying to relieve his true friend of such paranoia, and is simply too late, finding his friend perished in the bath. While on the other hand, we could wean the audience into thinking that the sub-character is a true friend, until he ultimately betrays the leading protagonist, dropping a radio in the bath leading to his untimely death. I individually believe that if executed well, both tangents would produce enigmas and a sense of mystique, yet we will have to decide which idea would have a more profound effect on the target audience we eventually chose.

To add a certain touch of mystique, we have decided mutually that we will not follow the conventional equilibrium theory devised by Todorov. We have even pondered around the idea of two identical shots at the beginning of the sequence, and the end of the sequence, sewn together by a flashback. Yet, it is important to note that nothing is set in stone. Ideas in the group will naturally progress through the course of time, with the plot-line constantly being tweaked to anchor our targets audience, genre and locations.

What Is A Short Film?

A short film is usually defined as being under 40 minutes, or sometimes under one hour. Short films are vastly different to feature length films. While feature films usually focus on character development and structured narrative, short films are obviously far shorter, so rely on quirks and controlling ideas to gauge interest from audiences. Short films also usually have a very low budget, which means locations and ideology have to be chosen carefully, and sometimes filming has to be done over a long period of time. For example, the short film ‘Doodlebug’ (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 1997) was very low budget, and the director, crew and actors had to film on specific weekends in the year, taking time off work and having to rent out the location many times.

Evaluation - Strengths/Weaknesses of AS Film

The short film itself deemed very effective towards gaining the grade that we did eventually get as a group. The genre for the opening (thriller) was also convenient for our group as most of the films we watch in our free time through the time of production were thrillers (e.g. Book of Eli, 2009, dir. Albert Hughes), as well as the fact that the thriller is the most popular genre of the target audience in which we intended to aim for (15 – 24 year olds). Taylor Gladwin (main actor in Allegiance video) seemed to make the perfect character in our opening, not only the way he looked, but his costume (the torn clothes and dirty cloth) completed the crazy man look that we had intended for Taylor’s character.

The strengths of our AS video really helped us get the grade in which we achieved. These attributes came from the entire group, which helped make the project more manageable.

Strengths:

We tried to get the filming done in one go
Continuity deemed a problem for all AS groups filming the opening of a thriller. So attempting to film on two separate days was a risk, as weather, attendance of group members, loss of equipment etc. We avoided this as best we could by getting as much done within the day that we had organised, mainly by getting to location early, getting preparations done as soon as and shooting from a variety of angles greater choice in the editing room.

Location hunting
The location was important for maintaining the mood within our thriller, so (like many of the groups, our location would mainly be on an abandoned house. The iconic atmosphere it created (along with the non-digetic soundtrack) completed the illusion we had intended. However, due to complications with authorities, we were forced to evacuate the premises, so we need a new location. Due to the urgency of the situation, we wasted little time settling on a new location (which happened to be the location we used in the final production).

Weaknesses:

Maintaining seriousness during filming
As the location that we used was owned by a friend, whilst filming, filming seemed to be ruined through many distractions provided by the owner of the location. Because of this, filming seemed to prolong itself, along with the continual breaks (but the filming was eventually completed as soon as possible.

Filming in the dark
During the first day of filming, due to complications in timing, the filming managed to get done in the dark. Because the cameras aren’t effective in the dark as they are in light, we had to re-film the second half of the film. All members of the group were annoyed at this factor, however, we came back the next weekend about 11 o’clock to make sure we had plenty of time to film with a variety of shots.

The mistakes we made and the lessons we learned from last year shall gravely influence the decisions we make this year in our short film. Though we as a group started filming later than everybody else, the overall result was the best in the year. This year we hope to keep this upand be the best again using these factors to guide us.

Evaluation - Organisation At AS

Organisation was an issue at AS. Not only was finding time to film the actual video a problem (due to time clashes due to work, events etc), but also organising who did what for the blog itself looked a problem in itself.

As we didn’t designate certain parts of the blog to each other, it seeemed like everyone was doing blog posts to keep up with everyone else in the group. Even though at the end of AS everyone had managed to complete an even amount of blog posts, at the beginning, one group member seemed to be doing all the blog posts while the rest of the group have nothing else to do. This was a problem because with the majority of the blog posts goes the majority of the marks. If only one person does all the blog posts for a group, he/she shall receive all the marks from that blog. As we all caught up towards the end, the blog posts were evenly shared out and this problem was dealt with.

Another problem we faced during the blog was the ownership of blogs. With people from our group not putting their names at the bottom of blog posts, certain members of our group decided to claim for work they hadn’t done. This year we need to make sure that people put their names to the work they have completed, because they may lose out on marks. As well as this, the placing of the names will change. At AS, we put our names at the bottom of the essays to show who done them. At A2, we decided to copy the idea of members in our group that were in another group at AS and put our names in the tags section. Not only is this easier to tell whose work is whose, but also it doesn’t ruin the way the blog looks (with the spaces for the name, unneeded lines etc.).

Finally, the blog itself is hard to have organised and the people that do it, but the stuff you put on the blog needs to be organised as well. At AS, we feel that our blog didn’t have enough imagery of the scenes and locations that we used. This we feel lowered our mark because we could have taken more images and filmed more footage of the locations to give the reader a better understanding of what we were planning to accomplish. The lack of this was down to not bringing equipment to do so.

Overall, the AS blogs shall be massive towards organisation within the groups. Not only will the above reasons influence, but also as this A2 blog has people who were in different groups last year, each group could have different problem could be avoided in this blog. With an organised blog, the group plans to beat last year’s score of 94/100, learning from the mistakes we made last year.

Introduction

As two of our group members were initially in another group, we decided to analyse both blogs from AS level. I am evaluating the Allegiance blog. Even though the AS blog managed to get the best score in year (94/100), we didn’t have the best of starts. While other groups were accumulating blog posts, our group had managed to finish our final idea for the opening of a thriller. However, when we eventually got started on posting blog posts, the blog eventually began to gel together to create the best blog of last year.

Evaluating this blog will begin the journey for the A2 blog, showing what went wrong, what went well and what needs to be done so the A2 blog succeeds with flying colours. As this blog is more advanced as last years, our group expects to post more than 59 posts this year (59 being the numbers of posts posted in AS). Also, the time spent on the blog in A2 will greatly increase as the time span to get it completed has been shortened.