Locations

For our short film/documentary there are two main locations; the house which is meant to be David's house where the interviewer will meet David and speak to him. The other main location is the place that David dreamt he met this person and where he goes to wait for the person every day.

For David's house we looked at a couple of different locations, two in Hethersett, one in Wymondham, both of which were either houses of friends or one of our own. However two of these three houses we looked at were very typically suburban and on larger estates surrounded by many other houses. One of them was a smaller cottage, although it was surrounded by other houses it looks way more of an individual house and has an overgrown garden. This we felt was a perfect setting for David's house. This is because, due to his mix up of reality with dreams, we wanted to portray David as not quite your normal person and therefore we required a house that did not look like an every day typical suburban house on an estate. In addition, the overgrown garden we felt we could use to show how David's dream of meeting this person has overgrown into a reality for him and, like the overgrown garden, has got a bit out of control. Also the house is quite simply decorated so if we wanted to decorate it in any particular way or add any props into the house it would be relatively easy to do. This is what the house looks like inside and out:

    

        

Furthermore, the house is in Hethersett so it is easily accessible to us all making filming there easy. 

Our second location we are using is central Norwich. This will be where we film the scenes in which David takes us to the place that he dreamed he met the person. We decided to go for a busy place like central Norwich rather than a secluded place as we wanted to show that you could wait in a sole place all your life for someone who may never come whilst everyone else around you moves on in life without waiting around - that is what reality is like. Therefore, we needed a busy place where we could easily show lots of people moving. Norwich is the closest big city to where we live and the centre can get very busy and so we felt this was perfect to film this part of the short film/documentary. In particular, we were looking at filming around Gentlemen's Walk and outside the City Hall.

                                          

      

Any interviews we do we plan to do in an empty class room with a dark wall, this is so that it will be quiet and so that if we use lighting efficiently the dark background will look very good and similar to what you would see in a real documentary.

All these locations are quite close to each other and are all easy to reach for all members of the group. In addition myself and Emma both drive so we can also provide transport for any actors we decide to use. Also as all locations are near each other it is likely that the weather will be very similar at all locations.

Target Audience

Who is the target audience of your product?

The short film industry seems to have it’s own target audience being somewhat a genre of it’s own. Although many people may come across short films every now and again there is a niche audience made up of mostly film makers and fans of independent films who follow the industry. With this in mind short films do not reach the majority of the population, so the target audience has already been narrowed down to creative/artsy types who interested in independent productions.  I would say that my target audience includes mature teenagers and adults; being a documentary, the plot being relatively complex may need a certain understanding of film, it's a serious topic and would have to be taken seriously and with an empathetic approach and appreciation for the art of short film, the general tone and language used would perhaps be difficult for younger audiences to understand and engage with, who may find it dull or boring.

How does your product engage with the audience?

The film should engage the audience by being an intriguing story line that makes them want to keep watching and with the sense of realism and real psychology the audience will perhaps relate the film to something within their life, wanting to understand more about the character, his story and why he is the way he is.

 

 

 

Initial Character Profile

The Psychologist - This character will be the brains behind the documentary, what she says will give weight to what we are saying. Essentially, like nearly every documentary, we need someone to explain the 'science' behind our main character and his condition. We thought for this character we would get a psychology teacher as they will have the knowledge already to talk about any condition our main character might have.

The Main Character - Documentaries tell a story, and so, with the nature of our documentary, it might be that the audience develops a relationship with the main person. It is likely they will feel sympathetic towards them, and this is likely what we will try to achieve.

The Family Member - Again, this character will help to add weight to the documentary, a bit of emotion. This may make the audience more sympathetic towards the main character, or depending on how they answer the interview questions, may help the audience to see a different side to the situation e.g. is the main character actually quite cruel to obsess over his search and cut off his own family?

The Presenter - This person guides the whole documentary, it is important that they are engaging and get the audience thinking. It is this person that will find out the information from each person we interview as well as take the audience on a journey.

Audience Feedback: The Concept

We chose to ask some people our age what they thought of our idea for our film. We then presented the general themes we found on a poster:

Final Idea

Since we decided to change our idea from a music video to a short film we have a had a few rough ideas. However, now we have a final idea.


Our final idea is a documentary-style short film focusing on a man named David who has spent his life searching and waiting for someone he met in a dream. Our documentary will feature an interviewer following David around for a day, seeing his daily routine in his search for the man he met in his dreams. This stems from our original idea of the blur between reality and dreams and some people not being able to tell the difference between what they're dreaming and what will actually happen in reality.
The documentary will feature the interviewer going to David's house to see how he lives as a result of his beliefs in his dream being reality. The interviewer will also get to know about his actual condition/belief. David will also take the interviewer into the centre of a city (in our documentary it will be Norwich) which is where he dreamt he met this man and where he goes every day to wait for him. Our documentary will also feature an interview with a psychology a-level teacher (who we will introduce as a university professor in the documentary) explaining some of the actual science behind how the brain reacts to dreams and how it can somehow confuse it with reality. It will also feature an interview with David's nephew or younger brother on how it has affected David and his interactions with his family.

All scenes of interviews/talking with David and any other characters will be linked to eachother by voice overs of the interviewer.

We are aiming to make the style of the short film/documentary very much similar to the style of Louis Theroux's documentaries where he follows round people who are the subjects in his documentaries. Not only this but we plan to use very similarly planned shots in the same way that Louis Theroux does.
This is our final idea and how we plan to achieve this idea and now we can focus on planning, storyboarding, filming and making the short film/documentary.

Idea Research

To try and get some inspiration for an idea for our short docu-film we asked a group of year 8 students on what they dream about. This is because we knew we wanted to base our docu-film on dreams and the brain in some way but we weren't 100% sure on how to do this. We spoke to a class of year 8 students and got them all to write down something they dream about. Some responses were about ridiculous things however the most common theme was people dreaming about meeting someone, whether it was meeting David Beckham or superman it was still a very common theme. From this we managed to come up with the idea of what if someone has a dream, meets someone in the dream and the becomes fixed on trying to find this person in real life. Although the idea didn't come directly from the research we did on dreams, it definitely stemmed from the research we gained and the common themes seen in the dreams. In addition if we based our idea on something that people commonly dreamed about then it could make our character more relatable to people as they too have dream about meeting someone and perhaps woken up thinking what if that person is real. We felt this made our docu-film more relatable and engaging.

This is all the research we gathered.

Shooting Schedule

These are the schedules for when we plan to shoot all of our documentary:
Psychologist interview - Friday 9th of December 2016
Child interview - Monday 9th of January 2017
Main documentary shooting - Tuesday 10th January 2017

The main section of the documentary we are going to attempt to shoot all in one day, this is because the actual documentary only focuses on following the character for one day in order for the weather to be the same and the actor to look the same.