Reflecting On Pre-Production Process

So far in our pactical production we have fully completed the pre-production process, which includes the synopsis, pitch, target audience, influences, storyboard, screen-play and film schedule. We began with the synopsis, which went well as all members of the group contributed to ideas and helped construct it together. We then started on the pitch, which was a collection of different ideas we all had for the main scenario of the production. Again, we all collaborated with this and came up with an idea each to go towards this. For our target audience, we decided to construct a survey which contained a series of questions about what aspects people would expect to see in drama films, what their favourite types of drama films were and how they would rate them on a scale of 1-10 as well as more. We handed these out to 15 people and they all gave us really clear and useful information, that helped us figure out what we should include in our production, so overall I think this was a very successful part of the process. After this we started on the influences, where we had to find certain films that had similar plots to ours and explain what they were about and what aspects they included that were similar to ours. We decided to present this on a power point presentation and talked about which aspects we were going to keep and which to dismiss. The main film we chose as our influence was Kidulthood as this includes teenage life struggles and how they manage to cope with it especially the idea of suicide and isolation, which plays a big part in our practical production. This was another very successful part, where we all gave ideas and contributions. After this was completed, we began drafting the screen play putting down all the stage directions and speech for the different characters that would be included in our production, which again was successful. However after having a discussion in our group, we decided that the original idea that we had for the production didn’t work quite well and so we had to alter aspects of it to make it correct again. This didn’t just mean changing the screen play, but changing the synopsis as well, which was a negative point about the process as it held us back for a while. After these points had been adjusted we began with the storyboard and as none of us were good at drawing we asked an outside source to help us with this. This included the different shots and camera angles that were being used in our piece and where abouts we would be filming as well. Overall I think that the timing in our piece could have been finer, as the problems we came across, held us back quite a bit, but that wasn’t too much of our own fault and we managed to deal with it, so I think the majority of it was very successful and we all put an even amount of effort into it.