The Evaluation Part One - "The Brief"

What has the brief asked of you?

The brief has asked us to produce a new British Social Realist film, which have been requested by Film4 - one of the great leaders in British cinema.  To give a real feeling of how my movie will be like, Film4 has asked us to produce the first two minutes of the film, in order to convey the graphical, editing and musical style the movie will include. The brief has also made it clear that our movie must include the conventions and themes that are usually found in the Social Realist genre. To conclude the brief, we have to be aware that we cannot use any copyrighted audio and visual material, apart from stock sound effect. This means that we have to find all audio and visual materials that are "entirely original", which will also able to keep overheads and costs within a limited budget.

Film 4 - the production company

Film4 is seen as the best candidate to be working with us and assisting in the distribution of our movie: "Devil May Care". They are a British digital company, founded in 1982 by Stephen Frears.Their themes include those to which are heavily linked and related to themes of British Social Realism movies. Some of the movies they have distributed to cinemas have received worldwide recognition and fame and they include:

• Slum Dog Millionaire
• Trainspotting
• 12 Years a Slave
• This is England

Who was your target audience and what themes did you decide to use?

This British Social Realist film is aimed at 16-24 years old. In order to appeal to this target audience the themes that we included are: teenage pregnancy, violence and alcoholism. Our group believed that the target audience will be able to personally identify themselves with these themes, as they may have been linked to one of these themes in the past or even present. The target audience will be mostly male-oriented, however there will also be some female viewers due to the inclusion of teenage pregnancy. They will be able to have an insight of the troubles and consequences that unfold, if a teenage girl like themselves were to get pregnant, drawing their attention to the movie too, not just males.

What other BSR films inspired you?

The British social realism films that inspired me are Kidulthood, Fish Tank, Wild Bill, Starred up and more.In Kidulthood, the unattractive and rather run down buildings and area gave us a foundation of where our locations/setting of our movie would be. By having a location/settings that are ugly or ones where the audience will assume are council flats, this will assist the audience in how it will feel to live the life of a lower class person and/or suffering from financial troubles. From Fish Tank we based our protagonist's (Tate) personality from the main character from Fish Tank: Mia Williams. She is seen as someone isolated from society, suffering from depression, alcoholic and an aggressive person. Our group thought that our protagonist should include most of the traits that Mia has and this will be able to strongly portray a good idea to the audience of what Tate's life is like: dull, mundane and sad. Our camera shots and angles were inspired from films such as Wild Bill and Starred up; both have many shots of the protagonist, varying in angles and distance, each connoting to different things.