Exhibiting our short film

We would exhibit our short film on YouTube as it is the most widely accessed video-sharing site. It would allow our short film to be seen by a variety of audiences and get the relative criticism. YouTube could open many doors for our short film as many users have gained worldwide recognition for their posted videos.




Our short film could also be exhibited on Vimeo as like YouTube it is a video-sharing site. However Vimeo only  allows user-created videos like short films to be uploaded so the community is more appreciative and understanding to the work and effort that has gone into a creation.



ScreenTest is a UK student film festival by the National Student Film Association and is another place where we could exhibit our film. Submission is free and entrants must attend: college, university or film school and have attended whilst the film was being made. The films must be no more than 20 minutes long and the deadline for submissions is 28th January 2011.

Other Influences

Our other influences for the short film include the range of T-Shirts by David & Goliath. The shirts feature childish-looking drawings with slogans such as 'Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them'. We felt something like this would fit in well for our opening titles as it would sum up the simple 'average girl' story in our short film.

Target Audience

Our target audience is teenage girls as they are able to relate to the protagonist and her story. Ex-boyfriends and going out with friends are all part of what the average teenage girl goes through. Even up to the part where the protagonist is stalked, most girls have had an experience or know someone who has had an obsessive ex. 

Influences

Before we formed filming groups I was particularly influenced by the short films ‘About a Girl’ and ‘Prey’.  The narrative structures of both pieces were done in a way in which the audience is able to connect to the protagonists, follow their story and then be shocked at the end when the climax was revealed. For example in ‘About a girl’ she walks through the park and tells the audience about her life, allowing us to get an insight into her life. However it isn’t until right at the end when she throws the dead baby in the river that we really see what kind of a character she is and things that she previously says start to make sense.

Conforming to short film codes and conventions

     There are many different codes and conventions of short film and our piece conforms to several of them in some way.

Controversial-Our film could be deemed controversial as there is violence and a murder

Low budget-We didn’t spend any money on our short film except to buy bin bags. All other props were personal belongings so we didn’t have a budget at all.

Small set of characters-Aside from the main character we used three other characters. Two were used in the cutaway and the ex-boyfriend was used as a mystery character where his face is never revealed.

Reality-Our shot film is shot in a documentary style and is about a common reality of bad breakups. The controversial part where she is murdered is also a reality as there have been many reported cases where this has happened.

Where We Are & What's Left To Do

1)      So far with our short film we have completed the sequence, opening titles and colour correction. We are in the process of going through the different effects and deciding what works best for our cutaways as we want something that distinguishes between the main scene and the cutaways.

Originally for ‘I Hate Boys’ we had planned that the main protagonist would be walking through the park and talking to the camera. However on the day of filming we only had a short amount of time until it got dark so had to be prepared and use our time wisely. We couldn’t get the microphone to work and as it was a long distance tracking shot and there were only two of us-one controlling the camera and one controlling the boom microphone there wouldn’t have been anyone to look after the rest of our equipment. As our time was limited we decided to film the tracking shot without the monologue and use a voiceover for the film instead. In our planning we had also chosen to use a layered shot so at the end the protagonist would walk over to her dead body and explained via the monologue that her boyfriend killed her. Although we filmed the layered shots, when it came to editing it worked better without the layered shot and was just as effective.

As most of the short film is completed the final things to do are: choosing an urban genre music bed for the end shot where the ex-boyfriend runs away; either grainy, de-saturated or vignette effects for the cutaways and editing the opening titles so we can use them for the end credits.