Planning: Initial Ideas and Pitch Reflection

             


                      

The video above shows our presentation to a small focus group as we presented our three ideas and then received valuable feedback on which was their favourite and how we could develop it. The PowerPoint we used to present our ideas is above. This feedback ultimately helped in deciding which idea we would choose out of the initial three, this ended up being the first idea. This was to make a short film following a girl as she grows up through her teenage years. This would be sewn together with a voiceover of the girl speaking about growing up, e.g. breakups, phases, school. This short film would be within the Coming of Age genre. This was clearly the favourite idea amongst the group and we received ideas on how we could improve on our idea.

One element of our idea that our focus group liked was the idea of the voiceover. They thought this was a good idea and would be essential to tie our short film together as otherwise the film might not have a clear narrative. However, they did offer some ideas to avoid potential problems we could encounter. One of these was the length of the short film. As we are aiming to make our shot film around five minutes long, it could be hard to create a voiceover that lasts the whole length of the short film without becoming boring and repetitive. We came up with the solution of fading out the voiceover at certain times and having music playing in between to lengthen it. The focus group also suggested we could use three different voices to represent the different stages of the girls life e.g. childhood, her teenage years and her adulthood. We also discussed that the voiceover would correlate with the different clips being played, for example when the voiceover talks about her goth phase during her teenage years the scene being played will show her with heavy black eye makeup on.

Another issue that was brought up by our focus group was the fact that we would have to find suitable actors for the different roles in our short film. An example of this was if we wanted to include a scene of her fighting with her parents we would need to cast two adults. This would be difficult as we don't have s very small budget and don't know anyone who would be available. Another idea we had was including scenes of the main protagonist with her boyfriend. This again brought up the same issue as we didn't know anyone who would fill this role. One member of our feedback team gave us the idea that instead of filming her with her boyfriend we could include simple shots which imply a relationship, such as a close up of two straws in a milkshake or a close up of them holding hands. This meant that we could include this element in our short film without being limited by the actors available to us. They also offered a few ideas as to other scenes we could include in our short film such as the protagonist experiencing her first day of secondary school. We also explained that we will be using makeup, hair, props and clothing to make our actor seem younger and older as she grows up throughout the piece. One member of our focus group also suggested that we could use distorted shots to represent her as a child, one example being a shot from behind her head showing her hair in pigtails. They also suggested we could use home footage of the protagonist as a child, we thought this would be a good idea to use as the opening for our short film.

Our focus group found the other two ideas to not be as good as the initial. They were less enthusiastic as they believed the shots used and the dialogue used would become repetitive. However they did suggest that we could combine elements from our other ideas into our short film for example they suggested we could use editing techniques such as a graphic match which we initially planned to use in our music video.

Due to the feedback we received we have decided to choose the first idea of the short film about a girl growing up through her teenage years. We will make adjustments and additions to the idea due to the feedback we received as it was very helpful, as the focus group was made up of members included in or target audience.