LO1 Proposal

PROPOSAL TEMPLATE

 

PURPOSE:

The purpose of our short film is to entertain our target audience and promote our brand and our skills as film makers. We are hoping to create an entertaining dark comedy that our audience can enjoy and laugh at. Products like The Seven Deadly Sins and The Sins short film inspired us to create a product that used the same character traits as the characters seen in them products. We are hoping to prove Doncaster UTC to be a college that houses students with great and creative ideas, and we are hoping our product could gain traction on websites such as Vimeo and YouTube. This would expose us to new possibilities and ideas that could lead to us taking a career in filmmaking. 

FORM AND GENRE:

The product we are making is a short film, the short film is going to be live action where he portrays the 7 deadly sins. Our short film is going to be called ‘Persona’.

The genre of this short film is a live action dark comedy thriller and is inspired from the seven deadly sins of man.

CONTENT:

The plot of our story is about a character who has multiple personalities and each one of these personality's relate to each of the seven deadly sins of man. In the beginning of the film, we see our main character in a shop acting sly, as if he is about to steal. This then continues into a chase scene in which he gets hit buy a car. While in ER he has visions of a higher being and then wakes up with the seven multiple personalities. We then follow our main character through his life as he tries to get used to his personality disorder, being tempted to commit sins which his personalities encourage. Unfortunately, he is influenced by wrath to stab his friend and kill the person who was a good person trying to help our main protagonist (this an example of binary opposition) This is because the sin of wrath personality makes him kill his friend because it is scared becomes fearful that his friend may try to influence him into becoming a better person, which would hurt the sins and may even get rid of them from the protagonist.  We will then have a fast-cutting scene in which the main character is scared, guilty and remorseful of his actions, he then runs away and we allude to the fact that he may have killed himself.

THEMES:

Betrayal, tragedy, friendship, dissolution, identity, self-hate, and evil

We want to use Steve Neil’s theory about repetition and difference in our project to create a protagonist that isn’t the good guy off the story. The main character will be presented as someone that is rather cocky and funny but is also sad and pushes people away, this will be shown via how he interacts with his friend. We are hoping to write a character that has faults but is sympathetic for the audience. Instead, the antagonist will be the personalities that our main character is trying to overcome. Each personality (sin) will have their own character traits, and some will be used comedy in the story. We aren’t planning on using any stereotypical characters but if we do it will only be done for comedic effect (this won’t be us mocking a race, or gender.)

CHARACTERS:

The main protagonist will be called ‘Adam’ and the side character who is his best friend will be called ‘Frazier’. Adam will be a boisterous and mischievous whereas his best friend Frazier will be the complete opposite and be kind heart and will always be true to his nature, and never resolves problems with violence.

NARRATIVE:

The narrative for our project will follow Todorov’s theory of conventional structure (1977). It will use a narrative formula like the classic fairy tales, and our editing will be natural as each scene will lead into the next. We are, however, planning on using unconventional editing techniques such as flashbacks and montages that show new information to the audience. We would use a montage to show clips of our protagonist being a criminal or fighting against his personality disorder. This would be a fast and easier way of giving the audience information about the narrative and would leave us more screen time to focus on the characters. We are also thinking about using Pam Cooks narrative theory about cause and effect (1985) in our story to show how our characters actions can cause consequences and how that can affect the people around him.

Mise-en-scene: 

Actors- Reece/ Toby/ Ellis

Props- Food/ Knife/ Prop IV drip 

Location- Hyde park/ Hyde park shop/ Town/ House 

Lighting- Dark/ Drowsy colours/ Blue and blacks/ Some bright sunlight 

Costume- Tracksuit/ dirty clothes/ hoodies 

               - smart, clean clothes/ polos/ Casual smart attire 

Target audience: 

We are hoping that our product will appeal to people who are young adults and teens that enjoy emotional stories that integrate dark comedic elements into the writing. Our project is target for people who are mainstreamers, and strugglers who are in the C1, C2, and D social grade. This is because we are hoping to show the grim lives of people living in these situations in Doncaster. We will have diversity in our product so that we can appeal to a wide range of cultures and races. 

Psychographics: 

Lifestyle- The main lifestyles of our audience will be mainstream and explorers meaning they are people who follows a popular audience and people who are waiting to find someone new the age of the audience will be 16+. Because the film is based in Doncaster, we can assume most of the target audience will be from Doncaster. There is no targeted belief or faith for this short film so we can assume that the people who watch it will be from different beliefs and cultures

Resources and personnel: 

Cinematography- Reece

Editing- Adil

Director- Reece

Costume design- Toby 

Screenwriter- Everyone

Production designer- Adil

Actors- Toby, Ellis, and Reece

Sound engineer/ Sound Mixer- Ellis 

Music supervisor- Ellis

Props Master- Toby

List of hardware:

A video camera would be needed to record all the scenes and the film. We will also need a tripod as we need to hold the camera up and keep it steady for specific scenes. An iPhone could be used as they are easy to access and use and are also mountable. DSLR camera. Livelier microphone could be useful as we can use on someone allowing audio to be heard. Use different lenses.

List of Software: 

The software we could use is premiere pro for extensive video editing, after effects allows us to create visual pleasing effects, photoshop allowing us to edit or change certain aspects that are static, logic pro allowing us to control and engineer the sounds included in the film.  

Distribution and marketing techniques:

Places like Leeds Young Film Festival and the London Uk Film Festival are places where we can distribute our product professionally for review and rating. We are hoping that we stand out from the other contestants and make Doncaster look like a place where creative minds create great products.

Where could you distribute your film as a prosumer: 

We could distribute our short film on websites such as YouTube as this is a great way to share videos as everyone who uses the internet or has an iPhone used YouTube often to watch videos so its easily accessible by the consumers. Also, with YouTube you can private videos so if we only want a certain people to watch the short film, we can make it that way by sharing the link. 

This would be effect in target audience because:

Distributing our short film on YouTube is effective for targeting our audience as on YouTube there is a huge and diverse audience that use YouTube daily to watch videos. Users that like similar content will be suggested with our short film which helps with the views and will increase feedback that we get on the video, so we know what to do better next time. There is a lot of post-production features you can do on YouTube to help with you video like categorising it and increasing frame rates. YouTube is also the most well know online platform, so this makes YouTube the perfect website to upload a short film to.

Settings:

To ensure we achieve cinematic quality footage, We must utilize the settings that are present on the DSLR, and smartphone camera. We are planning on making our footage darker using the ISO settings in the camera to match the themes of the story. This will match with the ambient lighting that we will be using within scenes that feature Ellis's character. This is to show the audience how his character has become corrupted by the seven personalities. Similarly, scenes that include Toby's character will be more saturated. Plus will we use natural lighting, and film specifically when its sunny, to shower his character in light, too connote to the audience that he is a good person. We will film our product at a constant 24 frames per second as that will make our product look realistic enough, while also being less demanding on storage. Using the iPhone 13 camera we will have the ability to use the new cinematic feature. This will allow us to included depth of field meaning we could make creative shots that would switch focus from the foreground to the background.  Also using the iPhone camera, we will be able to switch between 1x and 0.5x allowing us to film wide angle shots for the film. During filming we will use a lot of natural and ambient light as they can be used to connote the themes in the film such as binary opposition, and also convey the comedic, horror, and thriller aspects of our film. The ambient lighting, for example, is great at showing the audience that the scene will be dark and relate to generic convention within horror or thriller films. 

This story board was originally made as a gist of the main events present in the story. Such as Ellis's character robbing a house, being caught, then getting put into a coma. This scene is showed in the first three sections of the storyboard at the top. During this scene, we will film at 24fps and keep the iso at 300, this is because we want to include comedy into the scene, and lower the iso when Ellis's character appears and attacks Reece's character. We will also include a wider camera lens to create wide angle shots that include more than one character.