Permission for Filming

In this post me and Charlie have E-mailed our head of year, Mr Jacob, to ask if we are able to use the Innovation Center to shoot our short film. This is crucial because if we do not have permission to shoot our short film in the Innovation Center then we would have to think of another location to shoot, that probably wouldn't be as fitting for our short film's plot, and we would also have to go back out to do more location recces and more risk assessments which would massively set us back in the production of our short film.

Here is the E-mail that we sent to Mr Jacob: 

Two hours after sending the E-mail, me and Charlie got a reply from Mr Jacob:

This is fantastic news for the production of our short film because we now will not have any setbacks due to locations for filming and not only this, but we can use the Innovation Center free of charge! This means that we will not be spending any of our budget on the location of shooting our film and we can now go ahead and book the Innovation Center to start filming through Mrs Garrod.

Script

Here is the script for my short film now called "Room". As you can see I have written the script by following conventions such as including slug-lines and the choice of font. 

After the completion of this post, I now here an idea of what each character will say and how the plot will unfold, although I am open to changes to the script once filming begins because I am aware that improvisation is sometimes the key to a good comedy and also a good film.

Storyboards

In this post I created the storyboards so that I can get a visual look and the plot of my short film "Room". 

After completing this post, I now have an understanding if how my short film could look. Obviously this will not be exactly how my short film will turn out because I am aware that improvisation is sometimes the best form of comedy so I am open to change however I think that I is helpful to have this storyboard as a rough plan so that I have a sense of direction when it comes to filming.

Audition and Casting Process

We knew that it was crucial to pick the right cast for our short film so with this in mind, I held an auditioning process in which I advertised the roles in the school newspaper and when I had enough replies, I sat down with the applicants and held an interview. Asking them questions such as "What do you think that you could bring to the role?" I was extremely impressed with all of the applicants however I knew that I could only cast four of them and myself to take part in the film. I thought long and hard about each applicant before I decided on who to cast for our film. These are the picture of the applicants that I finally decided to cast in our film:

Caleb Prouse

Richard Montague

Dave Jones 

Amber Mason

Lawrence Dobson

 Joshua Coombe (Myself)

After the final casting, I explained to each actor what their role would be and then I gave each of them the script that I had written so that they could look over their lines and learn them before we started filming. I also encouraged them to improvise whilst filming due to the fact that it is a dark comedy and that most of the time, improvisation is the key to what makes a comedy a successful one due to natural humor. 

   

Short Film Synopsis

In this post I have written a synopsis for our short film. This gives the reader of the synopsis a general idea of what the short film is about without revealing too much information about the film plot.

Set in a typical college, a group of friends decide not to attend their lessons. A narrator talks us through the situation, to the students surprise, they are able to hear the mysterious voice of the narrator and they start to question their friendship as the narrator begins to expose secrets about the students to the rest of the group.

After completing this post I now understand that one of the next things that I should do before progressing is try to give our short film a title. I now understand this because I now have a main plot and synopsis and me and Charlie will soon be starting to storyboard and write a script however we do not yet even have a title for the film that we are storyboarding and script writing for.  

Music

In this post me and Charlie set to work to think of music that we could feature in our short film. We both have very different ideas about what type of music to use so we decided to take to Spotify to individually make a list of artists that we liked that we thought could have a possibility of letting us use their music.

Charlie set to work to find some very small artists that he thought would have a very high possibility of letting us use their music. He mainly looked for artists with around 10,000 monthly listeners or less. Charlie did extremely well to make the following list:

All in all Charlie managed to find 31 artists that all had around 10,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, However I set to work on finding some of my own favorite artists that had no more than 500,000 monthly listeners. This is a considerable amount more monthly listeners than the artists that Charlie had chosen however I have chosen artist that I personally really like so I think that i would have a better knowledge of what song from one of these artists would best suit a scene. 

After completing this post me and Charlie now have some ideas about what music we could inquire about using in our short film. We still have to decide upon what songs from these artists we can use however we have some ideas about the narrator in the short film controlling music somehow and playing songs that fit the theme of the scene.  

Main Plot

In this post I have bullet pointed the main ideas that I have for the plot of my short film and then me and Charlie have sat down and edited it to expand on the ideas that I have bullet pointed so that we could have a good understanding of our plot before we move onto storyboarding and script writing.

   Unedited                                                                 Edited                 

After completing this post, I have now expanded on my first ideas about the plot of my short film. This has resulted in me gaining a good knowledge of our plot and now we have everything that we need to start storyboarding and script writing. We also have left plenty of room for changes if we think that some idea might work better than others but we still have the backbone of our plot regardless of any changes that we make. On top of this, both me and Charlie know exactly what our plot is so that there is now no confusion when it comes to thinking up ideas and changing ideas. One of the things that we have changed straight away is that we have extended the ending of our short film so that we can end our short film in a way that feels more complete. This post has given both me and Charlie more confidence that we will produce a good short film due to the fact that we are now very excited about the plot of our film.