PLANNING: ADVANCED PRODUCTION INITIAL DEVELOPEMNT

To begin the planning process of our short film we decided to consider what genre we wanted for our short film. Prior to planning our film we did plenty of research into other short films by watching them and reading up on the award winning films. By doing this research we decided that genres such as comedy and sci-fi weren't the type of films that we wanted to make ourselves, however the more dramatic and intense short films such as Mass of Men that we watched had us so captivated and on the edge of our seat that we wanted our own short film to have the same effect. When brainstorming different possible genres there were some that stood out to use more than others. For example the genres thriller and drama gave us more inspiration for ideas than romance did. When discussing the genre, thriller, we had a lot of ideas for what locations we could use for our short film. For example, Thea lives near a lake surrounded by a woody area, this location is a typical convention used for thriller and horror films, so we think that we should take full advantage of this. We imagined this scene where this mystery man could be walking through the woods, if its cold we could see his breath in the air and the ice crunching on the ground, all this would create a very sinister setting and a lot of suspense for our audience. As well as this we wanted to consider the fact that we live so close to such a mainstream city, London, and discussed if incorporating this into our film could create a glamorous aspect to our short film. We wanted to tackle and relatable and relevant issue in our film to give it some sort of value and the ability to leave an impression on our audience. From this we decided that we wanted our film to revolve around social media and how it portrays people.

We came up with two different possible plots. The first being a girl meets stalker theme. This idea came about because all three of us had recently just watched the Netflix series Unbelievable, we were so captivated by it that it has influenced our planning process and inspired one of our possible themes. However we also came up the plot of a teenage girl who lives her life off social media. She posts lots of glamorous photos in fancy restaurants and nice dresses. She has a big following and a lot of people envy the life she leads. We want to pick out three different posts in particular and look into a possible darker back story into the girls life prior to taking the photo. We want to rely on using special effects such as emotional music and lighting to make our short film as touching and moving as possible for our audience.

Below is the mind map that we created when throwing around the ideas that we had for our short film including: the effects, props, location and plot.