Production Brief

Opening sequence title: A Twisted Obsession
Length: 2-3 minutes

Members of the group:
The group is made up of myself, Riham and Georgina. My key protagonists who will be acting in the opening sequence are myself and Riham, and Georgina will be doing all the filming. Equally all three of us have planned, researched and edited the entire film.

Content Overview:
Two best friends; Toni and Leanne, have been best friends for years now, feeling happy for the first time in years, Leanne has finally settled somewhere that she feels is her home, as she moved around a lot in her childhood, and never being able to make stable friends. During the few years of friendship with Toni, Leanne’s feelings towards Toni developed slowly into something more than friendship; this all was new for Leanne as she has never experienced this feeling of love for no one.

In the awareness of her love for Toni, Leanne begins to show signals of obsession towards Toni, this involved taking her belongings slyly to feel more close to her, then her obsession gets worse, Leanne creates a scrapbook of Toni, by taking continuous pictures of her. Toni being oblivious to all these activities, finally starts getting suspicious of Leanne’s continuous change of behaviour, as one day Leanne would be normal however if Toni spoke to another girl or boy, Leanne would be furious. This leads Toni to confront Leanne, this gives Leanne the chance to express what she’s feeling, she weeps and feels upset, then to her surprise, Toni rejects her feelings, stating she just wants friendship and the fact she doesn’t like girls.

This all builds up to the climax of the film, where Leanne continues to express the extent of her obsession with Toni. Toni becomes outraged by this, and starts telling Leanne how she doesn’t love her like that, all this talk from Leanne makes Toni feel sick, Leanne still hoping for Toni to accept her and understand her feelings and in the end admit she loved her too were all shattered, by Toni’s refusal. This leads Leanne to turn her obsession into a psychopathic outrage, where she turns aggressive and ties up Toni, concluding in her locking her away with her and brutally attacking her.

Target Audience:
Our main target audience is teenagers, both male and females but it will would be likely that females watch it more as the major protagonist of the film are females. The ways in which we decided on this target audience is simply because the lifestyles that the characters have are similar to real life situations that females are being faced with, therefore it appeals out to them as they feel they can relate to their lifestyle, sexuality etc. Being a teenager, everything changes rapidly, for example the different exciting obstacles they are faced with, such as love, friendships, sexuality etc, therefore using these stereotypical elements in our film would interest them more. In addition, teenagers are more likely to be conscious of the film being advertised as they are most commonly known to have media awareness and would feel more determined to watch it, although this all relies on how we market our film.

Research:
We targeted our research on a few storylines in popular television dramas such as ‘Skins’ and ‘Hollyoaks’ which connotes the main theme in which we want our opening sequence to revolve around. These ideas have jointly given us various ideas and elements which we might incorporate into our opening sequence which will positively have a good effect on our target audience. In addition, we have viewed and analysed various examples of film openings to give us all an idea of what fundamentals that are crucial to be included in our opening sequence, in order to make the genre clear, whilst still obtaining their attention to all the other elements of the film.

To give me more experience in the elements that make up an opening sequence, I decided to analyse the opening of ‘Batman Begins’ as the opening held a variety of essentials that I needed to be familiar with such as cinematic techniques, lighting, camera angels and movements, etc. In addition, it made it understandable to what was needed to make the genre obvious as it used all the major conventions of an action/thriller. In comparison to ‘Batman Begins’ we also wanted to use elements such as the conventions of a thriller however using other stereotypes of civilization in order to keep our target audience affianced.

Representations and Stereotypes:
The main representations that we will be focusing on are friendships of people that are too close together, which then leads into something bad. The ways in which we will be portraying this will be displaying the innocence of a friendship with another whilst showing the comparison of a confusing tie to one another which reveals deep situations which could make or break them.

On the other hand, the obvious stereotypes that our sequence will be focusing on are troubled teenagers as our main topic. To give the plot a twist, we will be changing the basic stereotype of all teenagers being signified through ‘gangs’, ‘violence’, ‘knife crime’ in media and society. However, most media’s don’t capture the truth behind the teenager’s outrage, which are the emotional outbreaks that might occur in that stage in their lives. As a group, we decided we would want to embellish that concept onto one of our characters to conclude in wreckage.

Putting both elements, the confusion of friendship along with the troubled youths, effectively this will end in the audience feeling interact with the sequence, meaning they would want to see more.

How will we check the film’s success?
To help with feedback and comments, we decided to have a privet viewing of the film to the pupils in our class and some individuals outside of the classroom. To help us improve our work, we would collect all the comments made after the viewing, expecting both positive and negative comments. However, with the negative comments we will then use them to improve our work to the audience’s preferences.

Conventions:
To help establish the genre clearly, we would use the specific conventions of a thriller to ensure that it is visible to the audience. Using conventions will help to ensure our work looks more professional and effective to help engage the audience further. Some of the stereotypical conventions we plan to incorporate in our work are:
- Mysterious locations, to create peculiar atmospheres.
- Sense of anticipation/suspense.
- A villain and hopeless victim.
- Images being blur and not focused.
- Shaky movements.
- A variety of camera angels and movement in fast pace to show the pace of what is going on.
- Lack of what is going on.

Constraints:
The major constraint that we have come up against is as a group, not always being together and therefore not having efficient time to focus on media alone, without other things getting in the way. Another difficulty is that we are all based at different sites, therefore most of our planning has been done through social networking tools such as msn or facebook, which helped majorly, as when we actually did see each other we could converse about what we’ve planned, which at times was overpowering. Another major restraint we had to deal with is the use of school media equipment, as there are more than one media class within the school; the equipment gets taken out quickly. In addition, some of the software for the equipment is difficult to understand, therefore training sessions are advised. Lastly, the un-controlling constraints is the weather, as some days the weather won’t be suitable for our filming, therefore filming would have to be delayed to when the weather was right, therefore putting back our production process.