Representation through the genre

Hybrid- Comedy, Realism

What different groups of people do you have in your genre?
In our Genre there is a specific genre of teenage boys, the actors we will ask to participate in our short film will be around the age of 17-18 so will fit into the teenage bracket. our short film will be a hybrid of both Comedy and realism meaning we will have to introduce our characters very quickly as the audience need to be able to relate to them.


What are the common stereotypes?
The common stereotypes within our genre is a typical teenage boy so there are many stereotypes, our actors will have to be dressed in very fashionable clothes that most people are seen in so that there can be a stronger link between characters and audience. The guy must dress to impress the girl who will also be a character in our production. The boy will try to impress the girl but will fail this is also a typical stereotype


Are they traditional or modern representations?
Our representation will be fairly modern as the story line consists of a boy trying to get a girl, a more traditional approach would be a girl trying to obtain the boys attention. The typical representation of a teenage boy would be hanging around on streets drinking with his friends and having a good time. However we want to challenge this representation as we feel the short film will be more interesting and have a higher entertainment value.


What changes have there been in society which have impacted on the representations of your groups?
Many environmental factors have influenced the way teenagers are represented, For example the binge drinking culture our society has makes the typical stereotype change into drunken yobs that walk the street. The whole "hoody" culture also make teenagers look very intimidating as it looks as if they are hiding something, it also make young people look scruffy and as if they don't care about there appearance. There has been a lot of bad press towards teenagers over the past few years which build a negative stereotype however this isn't the case for all young people. So although our character is going against all the typical stereotypes our short film is aimed at people from the age 13-19 and i believe that they will relate to our character despite not following these conventions.

Brief Production plan

From our Questionnaire results we have decided to make a brief plan, this will help us when we make storyboard and scripts. Is shows a brief storyboard and how each minute of time will run and what happens within them.

Key:

Purple = Swap/ screen split

Green = Minute 1

Red = Minute 2

Yellow = Minute 3

Orange = Minute 4

Blue = Minute 5

Mind Maps

we have produce some mind maps so that we can brain storm ideas and get a feel for what we want to produce. we established an idea that we would produce a short film where two people would swap bodies but when we planned more we decided to produce a short film where one person will be filmed in 2 different situation but the same thing is happening to him just different reactions.

Production Mind maps

Mind Maps

Target Audience Questionnaire Results

finding out what most people look for in a short film allows me to see more in depth about what people enjoy when they are watching short films, from the graph we can see that most people really like comedy and harley any people like escapism so make a comedy which people can relate too would be a really good idea.

This graph establishes what people like when watching short films, we have chose 3 short films that we thought people would like the most. They all have a roundabout effect which is where the film starts where it finishes. Most people enjoyed watching "The black hole" this short film is about a man who gets the chance to have anything he wants be he gets to greedy and ends up in awkward situation.

We asked each one of our participants how long they would prefer a short film to be, we asked them of they would prefer 2-3, 3-5, 4-5, 5+ minutes long most people preferred 3-5 minutes but then this is a very wide range and is not very specific so we also added 4-5 minutes so give us a more specialised result and most people apart from one voted for 4-5 minutes.

Asking what genre people like really helps us establish what genre to make our short film. This information can really help us when deciding how to make our film as we want to make it successful and interesting for people to watch.

Target Audience Research

We posted 3 videos on our main production blog we have asked our target audience to watch, we have also posted this on facebook, We then followed this on by posting a questionnaire using Google Docs to get some audience feedback, this again was posted aswell on facebook.
Target audience questionnaire

Genre Research

After looking at some more short films we found that most of them are not only based on an emotion but also a hybrid, meaning that they follow more that one genre. We will be looking at basing our short film around the age group 11-16, which is basically school year 7-11. We will therefore be combining the stress of being at school, along with social realism. As we are not far off this age our self we feel than we could achieve very realistic results along this line.