Initial Film Idea: Feedback

With response to the theme of Suicide as my short lm idea, I received several indicators as to why this may not be such a good idea. This was principally due to the short space of time with which I have to present the story. Five minutes is too short a time in which to establish the cause of such a decision to be made. Therefore, it is difcult for an audience to care for a character if they are unaware of what has caused them to be this way. As a means of improvement, he suggested that this idea be shifted from suicide to euthanasia. With this idea, everything would be inside the same story: an audience can thus understand the situation to a greater degree. Through this, I would also be able to more deeply explore the theme of morality, due to it being such a prominent debate amongst society. Another criticism I received was that I needed to dig deeper within the themes I proposed. This is catered to with this idea, with more themes such as appearance vs reality being explored. Location was reportedly explored sufciently through my idea. However, it was recommended that more was explained regarding regional identity. The area in which the action takes place forces crucial decisions to be made about the nature of the characters themselves. This is because to a great extent people are products of their upbringing and where this upbringing took place. A working class character from London is likely to be very different to a middle class character from the south. Also complimented was the use of character due to its usage of as little amount of characters as possible. The focus on as little amounts of characters as possible is crucial in short lms. We only have ve minutes to introduce interesting characters. This means that characters must be limited: the inclusion of only one character means that a character will be developed as much as possible in the minutes provided. The Unity of Time, Place and Action was also complimented as being sufcient as the events only took place in one action. The main problem with my idea was a lack of two of the most important aspects of lm making, a predicament and dilemma. The predicament that I proposed was tenuous, as the audience dont know much about it as there was no indication as to motivation and cause. The predicament is therefore too internalized and thus so is the dilemma. As we know too little about the character, do we really care about the situation that the character is in? This is where the predicament and dilemma fall apart: the audience needs to care about them for them to make a true impact. I was advised then to think about the option of euthanasia as an option.