Pitch for 'AWAY'

In today's lesson we delivered a pitch for our short film concept. In this pitch we displayed the various ideas we would include in our film (synopsis), who we would target our film at, where we got this target audience information and the various ways we would distribute the film.

When we had finished our pitch, our audience gave critical feedback and responded to the questionnaire we presented to them, here is an example of that questionnaire:

Displayed here is the quantitative data we took from the questionnaire's:

Here is the powerpoint we used in our pitch:

Here is us delivering the pitch:

Slide one: 
Hello everybody we are clueless productions and we are here today to present our short film – ‘Away’. The meaning behind the team name was based around the idea that we were starting completely from scratch, we had no idea of where we were going with the project and we have progressed from being clueless, to what we hope is a very good film concept.

Slide two:

As our film is largely focused on suspense and anticipation, building up throughout the scenes, it was clear that ‘AWAY’ complied to the majority of the conventions of the thriller genre. However, as our film is largely focused around mental instability of our main character, it fits into the sub-genre ‘Psychological thriller’. Both ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Maniac’ investigate the psychological unease of a character, however with ‘Maniac’ we see it directly from their perspective.

Slide three:

As we are amateurs to the film industry, we have decided that we want to distribute our short film by uploading it to an interactive, broadcasting site known as ‘Short of The Week’. Short of The Week allows all kind of film makers to upload their work for the general public to view, and at the end of the week one of these films is selected to be the short of the week.When we come to marketing our film, we are going to select the two ancillary tasks that we believe are most suited to our film. We will be producing the compulsory poster, which will be a great way to get the mystery around our concept across, nothing will be given away and it will all be left up to audience interpretation, just like our film. The radio trailer will also be useful, as we can portray the peaceful, harmonious bulk of the film through various conversations and music, then end with the baby crying and fire alarm going off, with the noise slowly fading, showing the sense of anticipation our entire film is based around.

Slide four:

From studying both demographics and psychographics we came to the conclusion that our main target audience would be Women of age 16-34, and people that like to experience and make new things. Demographics are a form of quantitative data that take into account age, gender, social class etc. From our research we found that women of 16-34 commonly have children, spending a lot of time watching childrens TV, like to wind down on a night and watch something enticing – which is nothing short of what our film ‘AWAY’ offers. Psychographics on the other hand are a form of qualitative data, that categorises people into 3 clear cut categories based on a VAL’S test. The type of audience we will market our film at are those of ‘Self Expression’, the bracket in which both experiences and makers fall under. It is people that like to make new things, experience new things and investigate or get an understanding of things they were not aware of before – I feel the psychological element of our film offers this to an audience.

Slide five:

In sub-urban England office worker Sarah, single mother of one, is living her average home life, when she is faced with a threatening situation. An anonymous colleague develops an uncontrollable obsession, following her every move. Sarah starts receiving cards, texts and various gifts that unbeknown to the viewer, become to first signs of stalking. Following a locket arriving at the house, containing a photograph of Sarah and her child, it becomes evident to her that she is in severe danger. As time progresses and the plot unfolds, we see Sarah and her child’s life put in jeopardy when the stalker makes regular visits to the family home. Appearing to the audience as merely part of the family, the stalker is actually watching his desired family through the house windows. Countless phone calls to the police prove unsuccessful, due to the lack of evidence tracing back to the stalker. Although the various texts and gifts appear to be the signs of a long distance relationship in play, in the closing scene we finally become aware that this is not any normal relationship. The scene reveals Sarah drugged an unconscious in bed, with her child crying hysterically, when the stalker is finally revealed, stood static at the end of the bed, watching the victim in a complete trance. I will now show you the animated story board me and my group created for our short film, which explains the various stages of the plot.

Slide eight:

Research showed that psychological thrillers tend to appeal more to women do to the fact that they tend to have an emotional or mental conflict (as opposed to a physical one) which appeals more to the female audience. Also because the victim tends to be female and women tend to be able to relate to the victim more than men.

Psychological Thrillers tend to appeal to an older audience as they typically contain some sort of mystery which may be confusing to younger audiences.They are also not suitable for very young audiences due to the fact that they may have scenes they will find disturbing.Therefore, we feel we have targeted the correct audience of 16-34 year old women.

Slide nine:

From watching other short films on ‘short of the week’ we have seen that other, successful short films with the genre of psychological thriller or similar genres often contain similar narrative themes to ours such as a lack of or very small amount of dialogue, a strong element of mystery and almost always a twist at the end.

Looking at similar short films also showed that psychological thriller is a fairly successful genre as they were very popular and highly rated, and had very strong and interesting plots.

We have chosen  to display our short film on ‘Short of the Week’, this seems to be a good choice as many short films gain popularity through this website, due to the fact that it highlights the most popular shorts on the sight and also because it is a site designed specifically for short films , so people viewing the site will be interested in watching short films.