Checklist, Storyboard & Film Schedule

The next part of the planning required us to create a storyboard, we wanted a clear picture of what our film would look like and to help us when filming and editing.
The storyboard.
The film schedule is to help us know when which shots to film on what days.
The film schedule.
The checklist is a list of things we need when filming. 
The checklist.

Mood Board

This is the visual mood board for the topic of our film. (Shown below)
It shows aspects of what our film is going to be about.

Treatment

A journey of both boy and girl going to meet on a date, the boy comes across many obstacles which delay his arrival, whereas the girl's day runs smoothly, she has no troubles getting to the meeting point.

The boy: he starts his day as normal things are going fine, but, the moment he leaves his house troubles come caving in. Simple things like him forgetting his oyster and missing his train bringing him to stress. Having to run back and forth in and out of his home before he even makes his journey. He begins to stress that he will be late as he looks at his watch constantly, checking the time in hope that the girl isn't there before him or has been kept waiting and left. Once he finally gets on his train and his journey begins to look like it's on the bright side, things start to go wrong again the moment he gets off the train. There's crowds of people its extremely busy he bumps in to people and ends up spoiling his top as coffee get's spilt on to it from bumping into them. He then has to run to the nearest shop to buy a new top and ends up not having enough money, so he then resorts to a charity shop and buys any random cheap top, which makes him look like a tool. on his way to the meeting point he manages to see a man selling roses off a stall and buys one for her with his minor change left. He feels like this is never going to happen his fate has been  ruined. He's very ambitious and strives to achieve his set goal.

Girl: She wakes up in the morning being woken up by a radio alarm, straight away she's up with a smile upon her face. She's excited about her date, she gets ready with ease everything goes perfectly. She get's up she eats breakfast, brushes her teeth does her make up. Her journey is simple and stress free and she even has time to have a look in the passing shops as she has time to waste whereas the boy doesn't. They eventually meet up and the boy is there before her In shock to himself and the audience. They walk off holding hands into the sunset.

                                                                                                                                                                  

Final Idea

Boy Meets Girl

A short film about a boy who struggles to attend a well planned date in advance, coming across various troubles along the way. While in the meantime the girl is able to reach the meeting place in time.

10 Point Summary

Initial Ideas

We came up with an initial idea each.

Kaltrina's Intial Idea // Saira's Initial Idea // Jessica's Initial Idea


Feedback on initial ideas

After reviewing all our ideas, our teacher suggested we use a really simple idea that would still grab the audience and can be easily done really well. Some of the ideas were too complicated to film and we knew the end result would look nothing like the original idea, for example, Saira and Jessica's idea seemed too typical and suited a more feminine audience.

Codes & Conventions of a Romcom

 A Romcom is a hyrbid genre which mixes Romance and Comedy together. Here are some often used codes and conventions:
- An introduction: usually dialogue which introduces the main characters
- The main characters are usually a boy and girl
- The setting of the film is usually in a big city which is well recognised.
- There is a happy ending
- Boy meets Girl plot
- Happy music with good lighting

An example of a Romcom is Love Actually (2003)

Love actually is a film about the love stories between 10 different characters, it is set in London
It follows the codes and conventions of a Romantic Comedy by being set in London which is a well known city, the story is told during Christmas which is seen as one of the romantic holidays in the year where family,friends and couples get together. Another element which shows the film followed the conventions is by the choice of music, they released to cuts of the film for US and the UK, in the UK they used known artist of the UK and for the US cut they used well known artists in US. For example the UK cut included Sugababes- too lost in you but in the US cut this was replaced with Kelly Clarkson - The trouble with love is.

Research: Short Films

To get started, we looked the history of short films and where they originated. They started in the 1910's in the United States. They were first known as short subjects which followed features and could be either animated cartoons or live action. They were usually comedies and some were in the structure of travelogues. From the 1930's till the 1960's, short films started to become minimal, resulting in disappearing in total. It was only in the 1980's that the short subjects were known to be 'short films'. In the modern age, they are seen as contemporary non-commercial motion pictures which are shorter than feature films.

We then looked at some short films to give us an idea of the codes and conventions of short films and to aid us in coming up with some initial ideas. We looked at 'Signs' which was a simple romantic comedy where no dialogue was used, but words on paper. This introduced us to simplicity and how we could make effective short films with simplistic ideas. We also looked at 'About a girl' which was a social realism/ drama which followed a girl on her way to a canal as she talks about specific events in her life, resulting to her dumping a new born baby into the canal. This introduced us to the idea of an ending with a twist which catches the audience off guard. This was another element to consider when coming up with a film idea. We watched 2 other films, Harvey Krumpet and Black Button, both of which were created out of different Medias (animation and film).

From watching these shorts, we concluded these typical conventions of short films:

1. They are between 5 and 20 minutes.
2. They consist of a beginning, middle and end.
3. They tend to be low budget films, using low quality effects such as the white space in 'Black Button', which was basically a white sheet and made to look smoother with an effect from the editing software they used.
4. They look more gritty and realistic than smooth and glossy.
5. They are low key, putting character names at the end or not including them at all as they are unknown and aren't significant in comparison to big budget films.
6. The narratives tend to be original.

We all created a PowerPoint (Saira, Kaltrina, Jessica) on one of the short films we saw and commented on the different shots and general conventions such as the camera and mise-en-scene and how it was typical to their genre.

With the research taken into account, we discussed what type of genre we would be interested in doing and decided upon a romantic comedy.

Saira's Powerpoint // Jessica's Powerpoint // Kaltrina's Powerpoint

Brief

Our brief was to create a short film from any genre of our choice and had to be between 5 and 10 mins. We were all enthusiastic about this project as it wasnt as limited as our last thriller film project and the time limit was longer.