PURPOSE
The purpose of our film is not only to entertain our audience but also to inform them about DID (Dissociative identity disorder). DID is a mental health condition in which people have two or more separate identities. These personalities control their behavior at different times. Each identity has its own personal history, traits, likes and dislikes. We intend to have our audience learn something about the condition whilst also being entertained by the content. By addressing this in our short film, many people will likely find it easier to take in the information since it will be presented visually and they will be able to see what is happening rather than just read about it.
FORM AND GENRE
The form of our audio-visual product that we are making is a 5-10 minute long informative and entertaining short film. The purpose of our short film is to entertain and inform people on what the mental illness DID is, with a dramatised therapy session. It will help to expose what DID is and the mental illness itself. It’s purpose is also to entertain the target audience.
The video will follow key conventions of its genre of psychological drama with how the short film will be filmed, with the mise-en-scene and the editing skills being used to make the film feel tense and make the target audience (15-35 year olds) feel on edge, with a visceral reaction, so a gut feeling when things start to get tense throughout the film. This means that when completing my content analysis, I will need to find and evaluate the different and similar codes and conventions from videos of the same genre. By doing this, I will learn what to include in my own video, such as any mise-en-scene or camerawork, so my target audience can understand its genre, which will mostly be obvious from the content of my video.
The representation of the film should also be done so that the characters are dramatic and reflect a more extreme and obvious case of what having DID is like. It should also follow similar codes and conventions of other short films so the target audience will feel a sense of familiarity.
CONTENT
In our short film, the storyline follows the main character, Connor, who is in a therapy session talking with his therapist for his routine check up. We see them discussing and the therapist asking him questions, but we also hear the alters talking in his head and his words mimicking them. It has a cyclical storyline to show how repetitive and this is just a small look into their lives as ultimately nothing really different has happened. We are showing this by having a close up shot of a clock ticking at the start and end of the short film. Some themes of our short film include mental health, internal conflict and audience discovery. One of the main themes is mental health as the whole film’s subject surrounds an individual with DID. Due to the effects of DID and having different alters in their head, this creates internal conflict as a lot of arguments could or will happen. Another one of the themes is audience discovery when the audience finds out that the person has DID from the close up shot onto the therapist’s clipboard. Our short film only contains two characters - the individual with DID and their therapist. The protagonist is called Connor who is a mature teenager and is also the host. The two alters are called Thomas and Talia. Thomas is 30-40 years old and takes the role of the caretaker and trauma holder. He would answer the more serious questions from their therapist. Talia is the opposite gender alter who is also a teenager and she is the more sociable personality. The therapist will be a young female adult and is a patient, caring character. One of the narrative theories which are applicable to our short film is cause and effect created by Pam Cook. An example of this is how the therapist asks a question and the effect is the argument between the alters. We will show this in our short film by using the sound. Another narrative theory applicable to our short film is that we have a conventional structure which was created by Tzvetan Todorov. This means that our short film is in chronological order as there are no flashbacks or flash forwards. Some of our proposed mise-en-scene elements include the actors, props, locations and costumes. Our actors include Amy Kinnear as our therapist and Max Woodcock as our patient. Some props would be the clipboard that the therapist is holding, the clock on the wall and other objects around the office. The location would be the office and the corridors when the character is walking towards it. Our therapist would be wearing smart formal clothing to represent their status as they have authority whereas our patient would be wearing more casual wear as they are a teenager and it is typical of them to wear more casual clothes.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Our team’s short film has a target audience, which is aimed from teens to young adults between the ages of 15-35 years olds. This is because the content of the film might be unsuitable for people of younger ages, as they might not fully understand the message of DID and it won’t be as entertaining as the usual kind of content they normally view. It would be unsuitable for older people than this range as they would not find the time or have the understanding of mental health. They might not know how to even find our short film on YouTube as they might not be able to access it. The gender of the target audience would stereotypically be towards women due to the drama part of our genre. However, it would also be interesting to people of the male gender as the psychological and darker aspects of our genre would appeal to them, so overall the target audience is towards all genders. The psychographic profile of our target audience would be explorers because they would like to discover and learn more about DID (dissociative identity disorder) so they would watch our short film to gain more of an insight to how people with DID act. Our target audience would be more niche than mainstream as not everyone would be interesting nor would it be suitable for everyone to watch and enjoy. It would also be aimed at the social grades of E and C2. This would be because the students in social grade E would be interested in our short film, either if they were studying psychology or media as well to see how we constructed our short film. They are also not in a full time job so they would have the spare time to watch our short film as well as the knowledge of how to access it through YouTube. It would appeal to the social grade of C2 because these people are not of the highest career goals and would have more disposable time compared to people in the A social grade.
RESOURCES AND PERSONNEL
Our main team members will be Georgia Kim and Lily. They will be incharge of things such as directing, filming and editing the film. There will also be Max and Amy who will be our actors in the film. The main equipment we will need to use to create our short film will be a camera, a tripod, a dolly and a camera stabilizer. We will need the tripod to keep the camera steady during any still shots but we might need to use a dolly or stabilizer for any kinds of tracking shots. We will need an area to film. We have decided to film in the UTC since the storyline's main location is in a therapy session and we can use one of the offices to look like one. The main software we will need is Adobe Premiere Pro to edit our short film.
DISTRIBUTION AND MARKETING METHODS
The music video will mostly be distributed through social media such as, YouTube where a higher volume of people can access the video since youTube is more popular. The video will also then be free to release since the video isn't being monetized, since the video is being done for educational purposes and not for profit.
The video can also then be distributed online through different types of social media, making sure that the video can be accessed at all times and by everyone. Doing this also means that more people can access the video - as well as the video being exposed to a higher volume of our target audience.
For the marketing methods we would have to make sure that the clips we have made are edited well and run smoothly with our voice actors, as well as our script and any other sounds that we may be using in the film, making sure that if specific sounds such as clocks ticking are used or when people are talking that the screen will cut to different scenes, in order to match the visuals to the sound. Doing this makes sure that the video is fitting for the target audience and allows them to engage with the product, encouraging them to watch it. The product should also be advertised through cross promotion, therefore meaning that the video would then be posted on things such as vimeo as well as YouTube so that the video can be seen and accessed by people wanting to see it. It can also be promoted on different social media, them being: facebook, instagram and twitter, so that people who see it on social media, as well as people seeing clips from the video will also then encourage them to go and watch the video itself.
Releasing teasers and product trailers then allow for people to have small insights on what the product and the product genre is and hope it will be engaging with the target audience and remain interesting to them. Therefore it then increases the amount of viewers that the video will have as well as making it so that the video is then advertised to a wide audience, making it so that the video links are easily accessible by the people searching for the video.
SETTINGS AND ATTACHMENTS - PASS/MERIT
Settings that can help make the cinematic quality better would be when we are filming being conscious of the ways that we film our footage. While filming we will be changing between auto focus and manual - this allows us to remain in control of what we are wanting the footage to look like, the manual focus allows us to change the focus of the subject or models in our film. The focus of the changing of the focus allows for the depth of field to be different which will make our clips more engaging for our audience - making our shots seem more dramatic as well relating to our theme of a psychological drama, since footage like this will add to the tension of different scenes.
Attachments such as the mics were used attached to the cameras so that the sound quality of our footage is better- this makes it so that the actors voices can be picked up better. in order to increase the quality fo the audio for our viewers would be editing the audio in software such as Adobe Audition where we can isolate or edit the different audios to make them better. So editing the background sound out so that the focus again, remains on our actors. The aperture will usually stay at F11 so that the depth of field remains quite deep so that we have everything in focus, but then In other scenes where we are focusing on our actors faces then we would be focusing on having the f stop to be a little lower for when. we want the image of the faces to be brighter - in contrast we could also use a higher f stop so that the actors faces are darker which can add tension to our clips and the overall footage when everything is edited together - this will also give us more editing ideas when we do our off line edit and put all our clips together.
Aperture settings will be changed when different lenses are being used - we will be using a fish eye lens in order to create a dramatic effect for when we are planning to highlight and show when our characters will be dissociating - following our storyboard. Things such as lighting will be done with the natural lighting since the room we will be staying is very bright although through the editing later we will adding effects to the lighting since we had filmed over the course of a few days and the lighting is slightly different.
Tripods will be used to make our filming smoother so that it makes it an easier watch for the audience, the tripod will be used for clips where we are planning on having our actor walk through a corridor. We will then be using the camera hand held when following our actors directly behind them in order to add to the overall effect.
For our script it was a small snippet of what we are wanting our actors will be saying - it also nightlights how smooth our conversations will be. Although we are planning on most of our filming to be improvised so that we get more of the genuine feel of a therapy session.
Following the storyboard we can then plan how we will use our different shot types and how effective we want it to be - it then allows us too visualise our different ideas. The storyboard also then allows for us to decide what will be making our footage more cinematic and what will be effective for our audience.
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