Initial Ideas

Initial Ideas

When discussing ideas for our trailer, my group brainstormed some of the basic elements that we would like to include in our work. We immediately agreed that we wanted the genre to be social realism as we wanted to make the piece a realistic picture of modern times and current events. To further this realism we wanted to give the trailer a more grungy feel so we could move the story away from a pristine and perfect world that films normally create.

We talked in great depth about what the characters should be like and who should portray them in order to make them as impactful as possible. We decided that we wanted one main group of friends, divided up into two boys and three girls. We specifically wanted more girls than boys to subvert stereotypes and make the females seem more dominant in the group. My group decided on using older teenagers as they will be easier to find and cast and also they will be better to use than younger teenagers if we wanted to portray more adult themes.

As we wanted to use teenagers, we knew that our target audience would be around a young adult age of 16-24 years old. This is due to them being more able to relate to the characters and the things that they are going through. As we are making a social realism genre trailer, we expect our target audience to be more female than male due to different interests.

At the end of our discussion, we started thinking more into mise en scene and locations which sparked our interest in changing the time period of our trailer. We were intrigued with the idea of doing a 'noughties' piece and portraying this through the use of costumes and props e.g. flip phones.

Idea 1

• Follows a group of friends (3 girls, 2 boys?).
• Shows they have happy lives, shots of them laughing together at parties etc.
• One big party scene.
• An event happens that is not shown but it is implied e.g. shown with a tire screech.
• Shots show the groups live slowly becoming worse.
• Them losing control and going to drugs and drink.
• Happy 'before' shots shown with yellow colouring and bright lighting, sad 'after' shots shown with blue colouring and dark lighting.
• Set in the 2000s.

Idea 2

• Follows a group of friends (3 girls, 2 boys?).
• Starts with a big house party scene.
• Shows friends together, a boy and girl from the group are in a relationship.
• Girl cheats on boyfriend with a friend from the group.
• Group breaks apart, boy becomes more isolated, fighting breaks out.
• They turn more to drugs and drink.
• The fall apart of the group is shown with lots of shots in a montage style.
• Montage speeds up near the end to build tension.
• Set in the 1990s.

We decided to do the second idea as it had a decided conflict that we could show well. We also liked the idea of creating a montage style piece as it will need many different scenes and shots which should stretch us creatively.