PLANNING: TREATMENT

Treatment

Daisy is a typical 17-year-old girl, happy, bouncy, determined and full of life. Like every other teenager, she has ambitions, plans and hopes. One day, she knows that she will fall in love, have her first proper kiss, have a make-over, own her own pet puppy, dare to skinny dip, have a wild slumber party with her friends...all of the dreams of a girl who lives life to the full and whose imagination, warmth of spirit and gutsiness will make her dreams come true.

Daisy carries out each of these activities, such as falling in love and and going to the beach. This always shows her strength and growth of relationship with her best friend Elli, who becomes Daisy's companion. 

However, the audience does not know one key fact: that Daisy has recently been diagnosed with cancer and informed that she only has limited time to live. Daisy challenges the cancer and starts her own personal scrapbook, filled with little things she hopes to achieve before she enters hospital for good. 

As Daisy fulfils each of her dreams, turning the pages of her bucket list scrapbook, so the pages turn and the days in her life draw towards a close, making the finishing of the scrapbook a metaphor symbolising the drawing of her life towards its end.

It is only in the final moments of the film that earlier hints and intimations of the seriousness of her fatal condition make sense to the audience who realises suddenly that for Daisy, time is running out.

PLANNING: PROPS AND COSTUME

Main Character- Daisy 

At the start of our film the our intentions are to represent our main character Daisy as a ordinary trendy teenager.In many ways she is a stereotypical teenager who loves clothes, dreams about boys and hangs out with her best friend. 

However she is an example of strength and determination that belies her years because she has decided not to be defeated by her illness and enjoy her remaining time by carrying our her bucket list. In this she is very similar to characters shown in films that has passed the Bechdel Test such as Disney's Frozen. For a film to pass the test it must contain a scene where two or more female characters have a conversation about anything decides men.

 As her face is not revealed this puts more of an emphasis on the miss-en-scene. In this particular scene Daisy is wearing black tights,a short denim skirt and a white collard shirt. Also we have tired to encode her personality through her clothes. 

The audience do not see Daisy and that she is ill until the end, this is the plot twist of our film and it creates a large amount of pathos. 

An audience seeing our central character Daisy, wearing hospital gown and seated on a wheel chair with drips attached to her body would mean the audience would decode this as the girl being  seriously ill. Our intensions were to encode messages about s illness. The intended reading of our representation is that the audience feels sympathy for her as they have decoded the messages in the way we have indented. For Stewart Hall, reception theory involves audiences coming to their own conclusions about meaning in text however I think this text will only make the audience feel sympathy. 

RESEARCH: TARGET AUDIENCE

This is a Pintrest to show objects, films and activities that would be related to our target audience for our short film Dreaming Daisy. 

PLANNING: CREATING PROPS

My partner and I have created this scrapbook. It is a main element in our film. I have created this Flipagram to show.

View on Flipagram

PLANNING: CALL SHEETS

RESEARCH: SHORT FILM FESTIVALS

SHORT FILM FESTIVALS

I have been researching into the different short film festivals to gain a greater knowledge and understanding of what short film makers enter and to enjoy viewing successful short films.

The London Short Film Festival is one of the most popular of the festivals and is now in its 13th year. The London Short Film Festival is also famous for premiering UK showcase for cutting-edge and Uk independent film and as now started accepting international submissions. This festival is an event that presents the best in UK short film-making talent. It takes place in January and for the duration of the festival London's best independent cinemas are taken over to showcase the short films.

To gain further knowledge about this festival I visited the website which stated:'The London Short Film Festival is a Mecca for the UK’s young creative talent and a significant date in the UK film calendar. Every year the Festival’s large and loyal audience flock to screenings and events, and this network has grown steadily over decade and beyond.'

Sundance Film Festival takes place at Park city Utah in January. The Sundance festival focuses on presenting the most original stories,attracting the most adventurous audiences and dramatic documentary films. Fortunately many of the films that are launched at the festival gain commercial distribution that reach worldwide audiences.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Sundance festival the Art House Project was created in 2005. This project involved twelve art house theatres from around the country were designated to the Sundance Institute and in 2006 a Sundance retrospective series was made available for each of the theatres. 




Edinburgh Short Film Festival is now in its fifth year and has moved from June to November to accommodate for the huge increase in submissions, the move to a different venue also allows the festival to be more of a one-off event during the year.

This year the festival have been developing an exciting and ongoing film exchange programme with the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival (was voted one of the coolest film festival in the world by Movie Maker Magazine). This new program allows all of the short films to gain more exposure to a greater audience.

PLANNING:SHOT LIST

ORGANISATION: TRELLO

Here is my Trello from September, Trello has kept me on track with all of my tasks.

I have now created my Trello for October. It is focused on the planning of mine and my partners short film.

RESEARCH: CLASSIFICATION

As part of my research I visited the BBFC website to investigate into the process of classifying a film. This research has proved useful as it has provided me with an idea of what age group I will be aiming my short film at. 

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/what-classification

Films for theatrical release are normally classified by at least two Examiners using the published Guidelines. In most cases the decision is ratified by a Senior Examiner, but if the Examiners are in any doubt or fail to agree, or if important policy issues are involved, the work may be seen by other members of the Board up to, and including, the Director and Presidential team. Occasionally it is necessary to take specialist advice about the legal acceptability of film content or its potential for harm. DVDs are normally seen by one Examiner, particularly when they are viewing the DVD version of a cinema film which has already been classified. However, opinions from other Examiners may be required for more difficult works.

Examiners look at issues such as discrimination, drugs, horror, imitable behaviour, language, nudity, sex, sexual violence, theme and violence when making decisions. They also consider context, the tone and impact of a work (eg how it makes the audience feel) and even the release format (for example, as DVDs are watched in the home, there is a higher risk of underage viewing).

RESEARCH: AUDIENCE

My partner and I have been researching into what makes a good short film as well as how to aim it at a particular audience. This research has been externally valuable, as it has shown us that all texts are produced with an audience in mind and that ever person involved if it’s an advertiser or the producer always have this in their mind.

PLANNING: MY TREATMENT

After visiting the Future Learn website, I watched a video featuring Frank Ash in it, he is a creative consultant who has taught storytelling and creativity techniques to teams across the BBC. 

In the video Frank explains his main points (advise):

• Think about your favourite book or film or any ‘good story’ you recently watched online, could you sum up its narrative into ‘one elegant sentence’ to provide its ‘topline’?
• What was its big story question, and how important was it to your appreciation of the text?" 

 Thanks for the presentation to The University of Birmingham and FutureLearn: 
Video © BBC, Text © University of Birmingham

From this is have learnt and aim to define in our personal treatment what the top line is and what the big question is. 

These are my initial thoughts for what I would have as the top line of my short film: A girl who wants to complete her scrapbook that later turns into a bucket list before she dies.However the audience does not know that she is ill until the final shot. 
The big question would be: does she have enough time left to complete it. 

OCR EXAMINERS REPORTS

I have been onto the OCR website and read through the examiners reports, by doing this is can help me this year to learn from any mistakes made and will show me how I can improve my work and method of getting the tasks completed this year.

When reading through the report I noticed that there was a large emphasis on the planning and research sections. It also mentioned the importance of making sure that all research and planning posts all link back to what we are going to be creating. 'The best work is comprehensive and shows strong evidence of candidates reflecting on the process of the production in their blogs, starting with the general and moving in to the particular, focusing on texts which clearly relate to their finished products.' 

LIFE IN A DAY by RIDLEY SCOTT

LIFE IN A DAY by RIDLEY SCOTT 

As part of our research into the short film genre, we studied Ridley Scott's Life in a Day (dir. Kevin McDonald, 2011) from an artistic and institutional point of view.

I created a Zoho Show to present my research. Click here to view it.