Unit 1- Type of Production

What does the brief ask me to do?


The brief for this unit asks me to create a short film for entry into a Short Film Festival. The short film needs to be between 2-4 minutes and must be suitable for 12-18 year olds to view. The brief also required us to research into a variety of formats , styles and features of a single camera production. The short film needs to be completely original and not contain images and sounds that are subject to copyright.

My initial idea for my short film was a simple linear narrative ,action comedy. I have chosen to make my genre this because, generally if you'd like to win an audience over the best way to do this is making them happy and satisfied, I think that this can be effectively done through humour. For my casting, I have decided to employ three (main) characters to play the roles of; a policeman(1), a second policeman and a lady who is mistaken to be non-law abiding citizen. If it is possible I would also preferably like some extras to play other roles.

The opening scenes would include the lady at home, in her kitchen making herself a cup of tea. We then see her go to the living room to watch television. However, not long after the two policemen characters come swarming into the house in a chaotic manner, and without any permission or dignified introduction. They (dressed in uniform) then arrest the lady without again giving any detail or specifying why they're arresting her, she struggles with them and doesn't seem particularly happy with what's just happened. Here I realised that this may be difficult to achieve because it would mean we need to buy the costumes and possibly a walkie-talkie, also the genre of comedy we thought would be useless without a naturally funny person acting the role. Therefore actors were a major problem. 

We move on to the next scene for which the lady is now in the police station giving her details to the police, they then take her in to cell where she spends a night in police custody. Again, I planned for the cell to be a frame instead in my estate where the door bars could be used to manipulate the scene, to make it look like a prison cell. 

Skipping to the mid-point of the plot, we have the lady from earlier trying to complain about the police men who arrested her without any explanation of what she's being arrested for, and no body is listening to her. This however my group thought would take away from the comedy element and the audience wouldn't be amused. 

By the end of the film, the lady after being released from her cell is now planning a major death plot against these policemen, the film merely ends with her walking up to the police station and in her hand a gun. The overall decision we made was that we were not going to not proceed with my idea unfortunately because we just didn't have the budget and cast for all the essential things in my idea.

I was inspired by many comedy movies such as ; 

We moved then to looking at possibly another genre, for which we decided on a hybrid genre of Horror/Suspense. This was mainly because It is one we considered to be the next most popular/engaging of genres which can easily be done to engage a target audience. The conventions of a Horror include things such as ; blood, knives, suffering/torture, death , a haunted house, a basement /an attic, the woods etc. For suspense , you'd be looking at shadows , a missing person, death (unsolved?). This combination was perfect for us as it gave us flexibility with many things such as props, costumes even characters. Our final short film idea was decided on and this was, a family consisting of ; mum , dad and daughter. The dad is a cold-blooded killer who tortures his daughter, the mother has always been suspicious of this however never spoke about it. Their relationship becomes increasingly worse and after many tortures and torment from her father the daughter finally overdoses herself in an attempt to kill her self , she dies and by the end the dad is remorseful of his actions and he goes to visit her grave.