I carried out a questionnaire to understand my audience and their thoughts on my overall idea to gather data on the target audience and being able to aim my project at the audience through better understanding and statistical analysis. By asking different questions I could alter my production to suit the audience better and to appeal to them more, allowing them to enjoy the video overall. For this project I originally was aiming to create a short film under the working name of ‘Transfer’ with the sole purpose to entertain an audience of the ages 15 and over, but can now see that my best suited target audience is between the ages of 16 to 19.

   

This questionnaire was important as it allowed me to understand my target audience and what ideas they like or dislike about my idea, allowing me to alter some of my plans to best suit the audience. Many said that they thought it would be difficult to follow and would have to have a clear distinction between the dreams and real life, which I was aware of, but allowed me to work on this to make it clearer and easily noticeable to the audience. 

 

I looked at the age ratings for an 15 and an 18 film to compare them as they are in the range of my target audience, allowing me to determine what I should include and which things I shouldn't. Although I planned to make mine PG there was some violence included, this being good to research to understand the ratings. For a 15 they allow strong violence but not to dwell on the infliction, gore being unlikely whereas an 18 allows much more violent scenes to show the audience that the character enjoys hurting others. With this it allowed me to understand that for my audience of 16 to 19 that I could show more violence but not to explicit for the younger ages, making it easy enough to carry out the violence and fight in my own production without having to worry about the age ratings.

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Originally for this short film I planned to have five actors which I managed to cast and get a script to but later found that one of the actors wasn’t committed and altered the script to work with only four actors, making one actor play two characters as they are technically the same character. One of my other actors, Charlie, messaged Jaimie saying that he was no longer able to act in the short film as his parents wanted him to revise for his exams and his grades were dropping. With this in mind, I asked if Jaimie would take up the role of 'Scott' as Toby and Scott are the same character but I wanted them to appear differently to each other. This was an easy problem to fix as it may be clearer to the audience that these characters and the same person rather than getting them confused and believe that they are two different people.

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The issue with working with students is that they have academic commitments and can only film at the weekends, this proving to be the issue with Charlie but was the decision of his parents so I shall not argue. They want the best for Charlie and so do I so I would rather him focus on his exams and myself having to organise around it. Luckily this was an easy issue to solve, Jaimie happy with taking on both of the roles and learning the lines quickly.

 

An issue that I had faced from the beginning with the actors is making sure that they are all available on the same dates as each other whilst also being committed to the project overall. It takes a lot of time and effort to arrange these dates but they seem committed enough to want to arrange other dates to record the film. The original filming dates we had planned had to be pushed backwards as the one of the actors that was needed fell ill and wasn’t available until the half term week where we organised to film on the 27th May and 29th May, splitting up the actors to make it easier to organise and plan altogether. 

 

Although these issues were large and difficult to fit into the schedule that I had, we managed to communicate well and get the dates completed for filming. The communication with the actors was the most important part of solving these issues as I could discuss dates and timings with them that would work for all of us rather than planning a date and no longer being able to film on such date. All of these issues were difficult to solve but shows the amount of effort that went into organising the film, linking back to the pre-production being completed to a high standard before the filming dates were confirmed, allowing me to use this pre-production to help record to a high standard.

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I showcased my work to the audience on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I also went to the college's exhibition where an audience were able to watch my short film. I produced a poster to help promote my short film to a wider audience by studying professional posters and the different styles. I kept mine with a simple black and white theme, adding both renditions of the logo to show the name and the main logo to the audience. I added the actors and actresses names at the top, making their first names smaller as that is what most of the posters I looked at did and makes the audience focus on their last names. I put the release date and small print explaining the producer and the director along with listing the actors, copying the small print on professional film posters to make it as professional and realistic as possible.

 

The posters I looked at included silhouettes and simplistic designs, the ones I took the most inspiration from being Leon and Shaun of The Dead, both of their posters being simplistic and visually interesting. Both of the posters include one or two colours that stand out against each other, making the poster vibrant and easy to recognise. For my poster I used the two colours of black and white, the logo being the largest to stand out to the audience and to gain their attention, the logo being interesting and unique. These three posters were my main inspirations when designing the poster to suit the style of my film. I decided to also print the poster in A2 paper to show what it would look like on a full printed poster; I will be giving these posters to the actors as a thank you. This poster will help promote the film and still keep the film mysterious to the audience, not showing any of the actors or actresses and neither includes anything that can hint at the story line. This can cause the audience to research about the short film, bringing larger interest around the short film.

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I also created a promotional social site on Facebook for my final production to gather the audience's attention and to keep everyone up to date with the project. Promotional websites are important as they are used to gain traffic about the film and to gain interest, widening your viewing audience and overall interest. This helped me determine the audience that is interested in the genre of this short film and to gather their attention, allowing them to gain hype and share this page to promote the film to their friends and family. With this it allows traffic towards the short film and to gain more interest than those of just the target audience, managing to branch out to secondary audiences that may enjoy your film. I also designed a trailer website for this short film to promote it even further, this allowing people to watch the trailer beforehand. Unlike the Facebook page which gives updates on the project and hints to the story, this website is made to create hype to the audience about the short film. This allows them to find the website and watch the trailer before the short film is released.​

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The first day of filming was focused solely on the Mafioso scene to make sure that I got all of the right elements for this scene and would have enough time during the week to gather pick up shots. Filming went smoothly, the actors turning up on time and knowing their words off by heart, performing them differently each time to give me a variation of emotions and reactions to what the others were saying. This shoot was the most complicated out of the two as I had to make a conference room in my own home, having brought up a table and making the scene around it look more like a conference room. Of course there was some issues with this location, not being what I had in mind, but it worked well and provided myself with the space to stand in with my actresses and direct them in their actions and how to deliver the lines. I used three cameras, one each focused on one actress to gather the reactions that they had to the words as cutaway footage, being able to use this to make scenes longer or more impactful to the audience.

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The second day of filming was with the two main actors, Jaimie Rossiter and Ryan Edwards to gather the rest of the conversational footage that they were in to complete the project. With three different locations, we started outside at Hamilton Park when the sun was out, one of our worries that it was going to rain from the weather reports.  Luckily it didn't rain and we shot when the sun was out under shaded trees as the actors were starting to get hot out in the sun. This led to some issues with the lighting, some of the shots on the bench being darker than others that I tried to fix in editing but wasn't possible to get them to the same level. This was one of the few issues visually that I had and I wasn't able to fix it completely in editing as it would become to exposed, this being one of the visual issues throughout the project. For the other two scenes and the acting, everything went smoothly although I had to read lines out to Ryan as he had the long, exponential lines that were difficult to remember.

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During editing I gathered feedback from two different people, another student who studies TV and Film and an audience member. The student gave critical feedback about the technical side whereas the audience member gave me feedback on the story line:

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'Interesting idea but the writing/pacing and technical side of production needs work. For example the sound levels were uneven and some dialogue was hard to make out. I liked the concept behind the story, the transitions into the dream state were interesting too. Put some "J and L cuts" into the editing rather than having new lines of dialogue begin with a cut, make sure that the lighting stays the same between shots, make sure that actors know their lines and are more confident. Some of the dialogue could be improved. '

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'The music was in all the right places and made you feel he type of way that the characters were, and you got yourself some a amazing actors.'

 

Editing also went very smoothly as I edited in sections by the different scenes and put them together in the sequence. I preferred doing it this way as it allowed me to focus on the scenes separately, fixing the audio and the colour correction before focusing on a different scene and repeating the same process. This allowed me to focus on the transitions between the scenes afterwards, which were more of an issue as I didn't have the correct footage to work well for the transitions but managed to use effects to complete the same effect. Between the reality and dream sequences, I used a png of lights over the top of the top of the footage, making the transition blur between the shots and using a ringing sound effect. This allows the audience to know the transition between reality and dreams throughout the film and what effect it is having on the reality. The music I chose throughout is to represent the tone of the scene, allowing the audience to use the music as guidance to the storyline. There were some issues with the lighting, not being able to fix them completely in editing as it would of made the shot worse so there are some issues throughout on the lighting of the scenes. The lighting was the biggest issues as there were no issues with sound during filming that I couldn't fix in editing, being able to alter the audio levels and putting in background noise to cancel out the odd noises that I didn't want to be audible to the audience.

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