Effectiveness Of Research And Presentation - FMP

During the start of the final major project I have been conducting my own research into what ideas I should do for the final major project, and out of my three ideas I have decided to go with the short film Money Hunger which has been carried over from my specialism project. My decision came mostly from a personal choice, the film is about Edna who is in debt and asks her son for some help financially, but when the bailiff turns up it leads to a scary altercation. I did research through focus groups mainly, I did a focus group with two other people in the class in which we talked about out three ideas and gave feedback on each other’s, and for my chosen idea I got mainly positive feedback but also got some constructive criticism on how I should improve it, the main issue was trying to explain the story without giving away the end of the plot so one of the criticism’s was to include something which gives the main story away to make it sound more interesting, I then explained to the focus group what the twist was and came across some criticism of how it’s going to be a twist so early in the film and to make the film more gripping after this happens with more twists and turns, so I am definitely going to reconsider this when editing the already written script. Some positive feedback that I got was that it was a solid put in place idea and storyline which is going to be good for the kitchen sink drama audience I am heading for.

The presentation which I did in front of some members of the class went well, the presentation was about my idea as a whole, it included my idea, the feasibility, my inspirations, my budget, locations and much more, the presentation went really well and I made it as engaging as I could with lots of pictures and short simple text and diagrams. The questions I got really made a difference to how I’m going about my idea, for example I was planning on having two cameras and making it a multi-camera production but it was brought up to me that I won’t necessarily need two cameras and just to use the one would be fine, I personally think it would flow better visually with two but I will use some test footage. Another question was brought up to me if the script had been written in which it had been but I explained that I had to research North London dialect and include more and also personify the characters a bit more to make it seem less robotic which I am going to be working on now the presentation is over, another question was brought up to me on how I am going to film this with audio in which I explained I was going to use a clapper board and an external microphone on a TASCAM recorder to then sync it up with the video on the screen. In the presentation I talked about some of my influences and the research I did on some of these people, for example one of my main research points was Ben Wheatly and his kitchen sink drama gone wrong style, I talked about this within my PowerPoint and discussed how I want mine to look visually compared to other dramas such as Top Boy, The Fall and EastEnders, I also talked about my inspirations from photographer Todd Hido and also looking at the codes and conventions as old kitchen sink drama’s from the 50’s, this all went really well.