At the beginning of the production process, I wanted to create a single strand short film (4-7 minutes) targeted for younger audiences my age (16-18). I wanted to create a short film in which some teenagers could relate to, which is the loss of a family member (i.e. mother, father etc.).
The story begins in a graveyard where we see the boy standing, staring at a tombstone. We then find out this is his mother’s tombstone and his mother died not so long ago. He then starts walking ago. He enters his house, sits down and goes into a frenzy in his house. He starts smashing glasses and plates, punching through walls, breaks down in tears and finds out he is all alone. The next day, he starts going through his mother’s belongings and comes across a purple/red folder. He finds a photo of him and his mother in a picture frame when he was a baby. He opens up the picture and finds that the picture is creased over. He opens the creased picture and finds a boy, similar to his age, sitting next to him. He then opens up the folder and finds different types of papers e.g. adoption papers and care-home papers, belonging to this baby. He assumes this is his brother and immediately goes out to find him. He finds out he, apparently lives very close to where he, and his mother lived. According to one of the papers in his folder, the house he lived on was Sanderstead Court Avenue. He finds the street and looks for number 63, where the boy apparently lived. He knocks on the door and comes across a distraught woman. He then starts to tell his story that he had a brother that went into care and was adopted and lived at this address. The woman then starts to cry and takes the boy inside. In the next shot, we see the same shot we had at the beginning, but instead he is looking at a different tombstone. This tombstone belonged to his adopted brother. He puts some flowers down, next to his tombstone and walks away. On the other side of this tombstone, we see his mother’s tombstone.When coming up with ideas amongst our group of four (myself, James Fisher, Tom Clarke and Daisy Da Silva), we chose my idea as it was the most detailed idea at the time.
During pre-production, we organised roles amongst our group. James Fisher was the role of a camera operator, so he was in charge of creating storyboards for my idea and using different films as an idea for using camera shots. The film inspirations he used were The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Cinematographer: Daniel Mindel), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (Cinematographer: Eduardo Serra) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (Cinematographer: Robert D. Yeoman). Tom Clarke was the role of a location manager. The location he picked to film was the village of Sanderstead, which is where I live. There was no permission needed to film at this location and at my house as the house scenes were filmed where I live. As we were filming my film, I gave myself the role as Director. During the production process, I was in charge of controlling my team and I made sure everybody behaved in a very professional fashion. I also starred in my short film, which meant I played the role of the 18 year old boy who lost his mother and goes out to try and find his mother. The film genre of my particular film is Drama and Mystery. I believe in the final production, the genre of Mystery is emphasised through the use of its storyline and its only inclusion of one character giving the sense of what's going to happen to him. I wanted the audience to want to know more about the film, I also wanted the audience to relate to it if they were put in his shoes, losing his mother and in search of his lost mother. The film used various camera shots and angles. Overall, we used a lot of mid shots of the character showing his waist up. We filmed scenes from various different angles as well. An example of this would be from 1:12 to 1:39, when the teenage boy is sitting in his living room all alone, grieving over his loss. I wanted to shoot this scene in various angles because I wanted to emphasise the theme of loneliness near the beginning of the film because I wanted to give the audience a sense of what has happened to this boy and to almost feel very sorry for him because he is all alone. I believe it would have a positive outcome if an audience were shown this short film because I believe audiences could relate to the issue of losing a family relative. Normally in mystery movies (The Usual Suspects), audiences are known to be confused on what is going on in the movie. I believe audiences might also be confused near to the end of my short movie because there are a lot of shots condensed in a short space of time, which might lose the focus of an audience. The music used for my short film is the instrumental of 'The Way' (hence the name of my short film, which reached over 3 million hits on YouTube. I believe the use of music is very effective in this short film as there were a lot of scenes that did cut to the beat and the audience could understand. It also emphasises the themes of Drama and Mystery. There were quite a number of scenes that did cut to the beat in my short film, for example at the beginning of the film, when the teenager is at his mother's gravestone and graveyard, there were shots that cut from him to his mother's gravestone to create the sense of loss and struggle of grieving loss over a family member (0:08 to 1:39).
