Research and Planning Process

The first stage of the project was the research and planning. After being given an introduction to the project we first worked as individuals to explore the elements and conventions that made short films live up to expectations, by exploring successful short films, their filmmakers and their audiences. The following task was to how short films were marketed in the distribution process. The next piece of research was film genre, followed by exploring the narrative ideas of Todorov and Propp. We were then set the task of creating a birthday party scene and applying a genre to it by using every element we had researched, we then did an audience research to see if we had applied the correct elements that audiences were able to recognise the genre. Then explored more ideas such as anti-narrative and the shark-bite narrative. Gathering all this knowledge in groups we watched then reviewed short films which we believed lived up to short film conventions and those we believed didn't.

After the research we then went into our own choice of groups to who we would create our short films with. With all of our newly gained knowledge and after being given a pitch by our course leader on the process we needed to take and the elements, codes and conventions we needed to include, we created group spider diagrams of those elements we would want and need to consider when creating our short film.

After our group started to think of ideas for our short film. Thinking of possible story lines, titles and the rules we would and should follow to help our short film live up to the expectations of present short films successes.We created a power point of all of our ideas and presented it to our course leader and the other groups in a special pitch presentation. Along with our presentation we created questionnaires for the other groups to answer questions on what they thought about our ideas. These allowed us to know what they thought about our ideas, narrative and if our short film would appeal to them because age-wise they are our groups target audience.

We handed out one per group, although it would have been better to create one each to get a clearer idea of individual thoughts, we unfortunately could not print out enough for one each. The feedback we did get showed that the target audience we aimed for was positive as they stated that they would be interested in viewing our short film, also our idea was original, which is important as every short filmmaker would want their short film to standout and not be compared or a repeat of an idea that has been done many times before. The only negative feedback we received was that our narrative was too complex and that we need to simplify it, this type of feedback was important when it came to other tasks such as creating our animated story board.

The pitch presentation was the conclusion in the research and planning process, the next stage is the production process.