PLANNING : The Target Audience

For a film to have a successful release the marketing team must identify and reach out to the target audience, we did the same. We identified our target audience as thriller/horror enthusiast that are reasonably young (15-25). This must be done to ensure that the people that would enjoy the film are aware of the films release and would be willing to watch it, to help us find our target audience we created a questionnaire to better understand the audience that we would be marketing our film towards.

In order to make the questionnaire and ensure that it reaches a respectable amount of people I incorporated the use of google forms, an online free software that allows me to make questionnaires and include trailers from YouTube as well as posters found on the internet, this will make it easy and convenient for the people filling in the from to understand what my questions are talking about.

PLANNING : Top Line and The Big Question

In order to undertand the way that storytelling in film is crafted as well as the importance of a good top line I studied Frank Ash's work and his words, and because of his work as the creative consultant at the BBC Academy he was someone qualified to seek advice from. As I am trying to create a trailer that would fall into the horror genre I learned that it is best to hold the audiences attention with a well written story and raise the tension and suspense as the film goes on. I also feel that minimising jump scares would be best as I feel that they often remove the tense atmosphere that the film builds up. To help us achieve this, Frank came up with two questions that film-makers should aim to answer in our final production : The Top Line, and The Big Question. 

Top Line : A creature of unknown origin pulled from the depths of the past. mankind believed that they could control this threat, however they were wrong.Its location is deemed too dangerous to be common knowledge, an organisation that specialises in dealing with these unknown threats sends in two elite operatives to subdue the being. Do they stand a chance against something beyond human understanding? 

The Big Question : Will they survive and defeat the unknown being?

PLANNING : Social Issues And Groups

Our film is focused around military soldiers as they combat an extra-terrestrial threat. Therefore the group and social issues that we will represent will be soldiers and how they are affected by their experiences. We might represent how soldiers are both physically and mentally affected by their experiences, maybe through representing them as crippled, or developing PTSD after the events that they witness. We could potentially show this through a time skip, or maybe they develop issues immediately. 

There is the option to have the monster be a physical representation of  depression, anxiety or other types of mental health illness. By doing this we could be bringing awareness to that disorder similarly to the way that ALTER bring attention to disorders or social issues through visual metaphors or in some cases making it clear as to what they are trying to do. This is seen with some of their work such as Dual in that they bring attention to a mental illness, in this case it is duel personality disorder. We may take inspiration from ALTER's work to make our Thriller/Horror piece be more unsettling and make our work be more unique and memorable. 

Our film will be primarily centred around the problems that veterans and soldiers face during and after experience on the battlefield, however we could try to implement an aspect of mental illnesses or social issues to help raise awareness.

i have done a pinterest on veterans and war to help me study the reality and help to portray realism in the film

PLANNING : Casting

 

Casting from AlexWain1

PLANNING : Thriller Genre Codes and Conventions

Thriller Codes by Keyhole Productions

PLANNING : storyboard

We created a story board to portray the types of shots and the overall story that we wish to make and present, below the shots are roughly drawn out and labelled as to the type of shots and what is going on, for example a POV shot of one of the soldiers looking at a picture of their family to make them more humanised.

PLANNING : Treatment

We studied Frank Ash, who taught creativity and storytelling to production teams within the BBC as well as to production teams outside the BBC using questions such as what will interest the audience? along side how the narrative will evolve within the time that the story is being told. 

Through Frank ash we learned that there are certain tropes for every genre that will satisfy their audience and we learned that a good film balances the story being told with the characters, the tropes of the genre that the story will incorporate, and the time available within the film to tell the story.

Top Line : A creature of unknown origin pulled from the depths of the past. Man thought that they could control it, they were wrong. The location of its whereabouts is deemed too dangerous for the outside world to know, therefore an unknown organisation sends in two elite operatives to neutralize the being. Do they stand a chance against something beyond human comprehension? 

The Big Question : Will they survive and defeat the unknown being?

PLANNING : Call Sheet

The call sheet is important for the production as it allows for anyone to get hold of any other members of the production, regardless of whether its a director or actor. The call sheet will have the names of the people involved in the production then it will have the phone number that each member has next to it, this will make it easier to get hold of whoever they may need. The call sheet is below:

PLANNING : Initial Development

 

In order to make sure that we know a rough outline of what we want to do we made several mind maps showing roughly what we wanted to achieve in our film, it is not specific as this is still the development stage but it contains enough information that we can formulate a rough outline of the story as well as get a better idea of what we want to make