Initial Ideas

Our initial idea was to do a short film using the genre of thriller/crime. We were all excited at the prospect of making a short film. Even though we wanted to a crime/thriller genre type of short film, we wanted to make sure our target audiences would also want the same thing.

To understand what our target audience wanted, we made a survey on Survey Monkey and put it across all o our social-media accounts so people could complete the survey.

In conclusion to the survey results, we discovered that the majority of both male and female target audiences also felt that the crime/thriller genre would be the right choice for a short film.

Audiences also felt that the use of violence, language etc in a short film of our genre was okay to show. Because our film is aimed at people who comply with the BBFC rating of 15 and onwards, we needed to understand what the regulations were on aspects such as violence and drug use.

The BBFC state that the violence may be violent, but should not 'dwell on the infliction of pain or injury'. Because of these regulations, we have to make sure when writing the script that we follow these rules to stay within the legal legislation of our age category.

We initially wanted to do a thriller/crime genre type of short film because we felt that this genre of film was the most exciting and anticipating to create. Because our short film has to meet the required length of 5 minutes, we knew we didn't have much time to create a really complex story, we knew we had to focus on camera angles, lighting and sound. We also felt the crime/thriller genre allowed us to play around with various different shots to comply with the mark scheme. To allow us to get the best grade possible, we knew we had to show shots in scenes that had a diverse and complex range. The same went for sound and lighting. The sound of the film must be as good as we are able to record with the equipment we have been given. I personally felt that the only risk with doing a action/thriller type of short film was that, if we had certain scenes that needed realism (for example a gun being shot) it would be hard to create a realistic sound. However, I think when writing the script, we must write it with the understanding that we don't have access to certain pieces of equipment. Writing a scene which involves a sound thats not possible to create realistically is something we must think about when writing, otherwise we could potentially drop marks.

In terms of style for our short film, we were intending to make the scenes fast paced to keep the audience interested and conspicuous to whats going to happen next. I watch a lot of Martin Scorsese's films (such as Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street) and his style of filmmaking is that the scenes are very fast. I like this style because I think having fast paced mixed with moments which are slow and tense creates a really intriguing film.