Short Film Pitch Q&A

Above is a video where I delivered my teams pitch for our short film idea to an audience. A Q&A session did occur at the end, however the memory card as full, so was unable to capture the questions. At the the end of the pitch, the questions the audience asked are stated below with our responses;

How will you make the shots with text messages in look professional?

The solution to this question is that the text messages will be displayed in an alternative way. We knew that the text messages are hard to film due having to film an over the shoulder shot with the characters hands typing in the shot. Obviously, this is hard to execute, and we took this into account by generating the options of either, having the text messages appear on the screen itself whilst being able to maintain mid shots, close-up and extreme close-ups to show the reactions to the text messages being sent and read by the protagonist, Zola. Therefore, this then obtains a professional edge to the shots but having clear and steady shots which allows better viewing pleasure, being as close as possible to the quality of 'big' films who have higher technology to aid them. Alternatively, we may even remove the audience sight of the text messages, and just have the protagonist see the message and as an audience we see her reactions. We can therefore, have that same professional impact through this method too.

Have you got the mask and costumes for your characters?

The costume for our protagonist is completely sorted already. We have white/light clothing for females already, being tops, shorts, tracksuit bottoms, jackets, jumpers, the lot. Moving onto the antagonist, we have decided he will be in all black/dark clothing. We have got the trousers and jacket sorted already. However, for the mask of Grimm, we had in mind the one on our pitch, however, we thought to create questionnaires to open up on social media to get the audience insight. We will create a first questionnaire to ask the audience their favourite mask from each category of mask to begin with, such as, animal masks, clown masks, zombie masks etc. Then we will take the audiences favourite mask from each and place them in a final questionnaire and get their overall favourite for the most frightening mask. We will see if the majority has dominate a certain mask and if we feel it suits our role, then we will purchase this mask.

The question below then was a question that followed up the previous question asked.

What if the masks are expensive? Have you got a certain budget for the mask? What research and where will you find the masks you are using in the questionnaires?

Jade and I have already taken all this into account. We have set a budget of £20 maximum for a mask, so it isn't too expensive but definitely worth the investment to tailor the audience preference. We also made it very clear the masks we put into the questionnaire have to be purchasable, within the budget and noted where from. Therefore, all the masks we will place into the questionnaire will be available and affordable. With this, we shouldn't encounter any problems.