How representation will effect our genre

Our short film is mainly based around the teenager range as this will be the age of the actors we get to participate in the making of our short film. We will have to make sure that we represent our characters well and as typical stereotypes as it is essential in a short film that the characters are established as quickly as possible. Our short film will be a hybrid of both comedy and realism this means that establishing the character is particularly important as the audience need to be able to relate to our character.

The common stereotype within our genre is a typical teenage boy. This means dressing our character in fashionable clothes for example a branded top, jeans, and fashionable shoes. It is also important that we ensure that the hair of our character is also done to the high standard of a teenage boy trying to impress the girl which he inevitably cannot get.

Our representation will be quite modernt as its the story of the boy trying to impress and get the girl. Whereas a more traditional approach would be having our character hanging around on street corners with his friends drinking and taking drugs. Our character however will be a boy that's trying to impress a girl and his friends but instead finds he's being ignored. This is different from the traditional stereotype as in traditional views the teenage boy would be very confident and be able to get any girl he wants.

There has been many changes within our society that has effected our view of typical teenagers. For example the binge drinking culture our society has makes the typical stereotype change into drunken yobs that walk the street. The whole "hoody" culture also make teenagers look very intimidating as it looks as if they are hiding something, it also make young people look scruffy and as if they don't care about there appearance. There has been a lot of bad press towards teenagers over the past few years which build a negative stereotype however this isn't the case for all young people. So although our character is going against all the typical stereotypes our short film is aimed at people from the age 13-19 and i believe that they will relate to our character despite not following these conventions.

Brief Production Plan

We created a brief production plan to give us a rough idea of the story line we will be following. This will then be backed up by our story board and script writing however it will ensure that we are clear on how to write this and will make it easier to visualize the type of shots we will need to consider. It will also ensurethat we done run over the 5 minutes as each different colour of the bar is representing the different minutes.

Purple = Split screen

Production Mind Maps

Mind Maps We produced mind maps whilst brainstorming our idea for our short film. This then led on to coming up with an idea which involved two characters swapping bodies. This then led onto to coming up with an idea which instead of two people swapping bodies instead we see the same person but in too different realities, one being a dream world and one being reality. We will be later creating a short production plan for our developed idea.

Target Audience Questionnaire Results

After collected all of our results we took the most important sets of results and put these into graphs. This will help us to understand how our target audience think and the type of short films they are looking for.

This graph makes it clear that people watch short films to relax as the majority of people said they look for comedies. This allows us to see that we need to ensure that there is a funny element to our short film in order to get the best possible results.

As the majority of people liked the black hole short film it shows that our target audience want to see something lighthearted but also with a meaning. The black hole was also the same length that most people said they thought was the best length of time.

This graph shows that people like to watch short films that range from 3-5 minutes, this is because it keeps them drawn into the film but doesn't last too long either. This is a very important result to us as it allows us to produce a short film to a good length.

The type genre that most people are interested in is comedy. We found that this is because people watch short films to relax and as they are so short you don't get enough time to establish a hard hitting story line. This question will ensure that we appeal to our target audience via the best genre.

Target Audience Research

We posted 3 viedos on our main production blog we have asked our target audience to watch, we have also posted this on facebook.
Video Post

We then followed this on by posting a questionnaire using google docs to get some audience feedback, this again was posted aswell on facebook.
Questionnaire Link

Further Genre Research

After looking at some more short films we found that most of them are not only based on an emotion but also a hybrid, meaning that they follow more that one genre. We will be looking at basing our short film around the age group 11-16, which is basically school year 7-11. We will therefore be combining the stress of being at school, along with social realism. As we are not far off this age ourself we feel than we could achieve very realistic results along this line.

Concluded Research From Short Films

After looking at short films presented on the bbc website i have found some very useful points i must take into account. These are:

- The characters must be introduced very quickly if introduced at all

- Short films reach a climax very quickly and then the rest of the film is used for solving this.

- The plot has to be very simple yet effective but being too complicated will cause the short film to come to a sudden end.

-The location is very important to quickly establish the setting

Although these are very little points it is essential that we take all of this into account to ensure that we follow the proper conventions of a short film.