Specialism Project Evaluation

For the specialism project we had to make a media film in any medium in the style of someone who we admire in the film industry, I decided to write a script for it because I had a few setbacks for filming short film. I decided to go with quite new on the scene Ben Wheatly who has been directing, producing and writing feature films and some TV shows since 2009, his first feature film was Down Terrace and has worked on TV shows such as Modern Toss and The Wrong door as well as directing films such as Kill List, Sightseers, The ABC’s Of Death, Free Fire, A Field In England and his most successful film to date High Rise. My idea development started very early and I started off with three ideas for a short film but decided to go with the film idea I had called Money Hunger, it was about a mother and a son called Jim and Edna who live very separate lives, but when the mum is in a lot of money trouble and is in huge trouble with bailiffs, he decides to go and visit her to try and help with her money troubles, he soon discovers that she is heavily into debt and his sister Jenny got her into the debt from a payday loan that she took out because her late husband was low on money and in a lot of debt. The bailiff then visits the house when Jim visits Edna, Jim lets him in to see if they can sort it out and when he finds out that she is £83,000 in debt he gets very frustrated, when the bailiff decides to let himself go round the house with no permission from Edna, Jim gets very frustrated and decides to kill him in the heat of the moment.

The idea development came from elements of Wheatly’s storylines and themes that runs through most of his films, I took the location of it being in a park home/caravan from his previous locations being in a caravan in the film Sightseers and small houses in films Down Terrace and Kill List, I decided to have about 95% of the film set in the caravan site because it takes inspiration from Wheatly’s small locations and some of the narrative being set outside of the main location but not all of it. The character development took inspirations from some of Wheatly’s characters, for example I took some inspiration from the character Carol from sightseers who plays a stale old woman who doesn’t want her daughter to leave with this guy who she hardly knows, she also holds a grudge against the daughter for accidentally killing their dog in a freak accident, I took inspiration from this character because she is a little old lady who is very frail, I have changed it so Edna in my story is very innocent rather than rude and malicious like Carol in Sightseers. The inspiration I had for Jim was Neil Maskell’s character Jay in the film Kill List because he is a brutal Londoner who seems like a normal guy in the smallest at the beginning of the film and then implodes into a psychopathic nightmare when we find out who he really is, I wanted to take elements of this when creating the character of Jim to make it look like he is a very scary guy who has a lot of demons in his system. The character development when writing the script was a success and actually developed whilst writing although the only disadvantage was trying to make an unhappy on screen relationship between Jim and Edna, I wanted to make it look like there was a happy relationship in the past and something went wrong which I am still working on now whilst editing the script.

Personal Strengths In The Project

• I was able to write a 26 page script for a short film which was extremely successful, it had all the elements that a script should have and for my first time writing a script it went very well.

• I created three characters that will be appealing to what I want them to be like on screen through character development.

• The storyline I came up with in my opinion was a great storyline, it was very gruesome and brutal storyline that was created completely from inspirations from Ben Wheatly, although I was constantly developing throughout the project it came out very well

• The inspirations from Ben Wheatly really showed through with the character development from characters from his film being very similar and inspiring to my film as well as the storylines being very inspiring to my film, for example the storylines from my film took inspiration from the psychopathic characters from Wheatly’s films and that’s how I came up with the whole idea.

• Another strength is that even though I took a lot of inspiration from Ben Wheatly the idea was very original and bailiffs is something he has never portrayed in the film, I took inspirations about money troubles from Kill List and Down Terrace and the character development inspirations from Kill List and sightseers but I am very pleased that it is a original idea.

Personal Weaknesses in the Project

• Due to not getting the script written and another project running along-side this I didn’t have enough time to actually film the project which is my fault for not dedicating my time to this project as much, this has taught me to do as much work prior to filming so that I can get on with filming earliest as possible

• Another weakness is that some of the linguistics in the script were very not true to life with the character of Jim being from North London, some of the sentences need to be less robotic and more research needs to be done into the language of people from different locations.

Conclusion

Even though this project didn’t get filmed, the script went really well with character development and storylines, I have decided to continue with the script and film it for the final major project to get the final grade for the year, so I am going on in the final major project to find actors, locations and props to film with, It should hopefully be a success.