Target Audience

Our target audience for our childrens film, will be Familys (Children and Parents), Because the parents are most likely the people taking the children to see the film at the cinema or to buy it on dvd. As the film is a U it will focus on children aged around 5-6 and there parents, who are most likely to be 25+.

BBFC lesson

In the BBFC lesson we looked at the classifications 'U' and 'PG' for films. We researched different guidlines for the classifications because our childrens film has to be a U film. So this will help us because we now know the guidelines for U films, for example in U films there should be very little mild bad language and Drugs should not be mentioned unless the film teaches that drugs are bad.

Back to the future storyboard lesson.

In the back to the futur storyboard lesson we watched the opening scene to the film ‘Back to the future'. From this we created a storyboard of what shots and cuts were used in the opening sequence. In my book I took notes on what theme was set by the long duration shot of the clocks. In our storyboard we drew what the set looked like and added arrowsd to show where the camera was going to next or what shot was next. We also showed where about the main character was moving and what he was doing.

Progress report

So far We've found the planning and production process to be relatively straightforward however we have encountered a few small problems, for instance on the day of the second part of our filming, the main character was absent and as we had to have completed our filming that day we had to overcome the problem by restarting the filming with another actor playing his role.
Our plan for after half term is to commence with the editing of our sequence, one of our main priorities for this segment of the project will be adding a title sequence to our footage to make it seem a little bit more like a real film. We will do this part first and then the editing of the actual footage, followed by the soundtrack work that is still to be done, this is so we know exactly what will be going on in each scene and will be better able to line up the music with the video when we come to do the soundtrack stage.

'Back to the future' storyboard

In this lesson we watched the opening scene to ‘Back to the future’, took notes and created a storyboard of the scene.  I wrote how the imagery of clocks connotes the general theme of the film, also, how a sense of place is created by the long duration shot that runs along a large part of the house. In our storyboard we drew an interpretation of the house and added arrows and labels to show which direction the camera goes and where the main character moves. We then drew the close ups of the dials being turned and finally the main character standing in front of the large speaker.

Film influence

The movie that influenced the opening of our children’s film for me was the film ‘Like Mike’. The movie is about a small child who lives in a foster home with cruel and unreasonable man and many other children. One of the boys is a clear nemesis to the main character. This is demonstrated through a grudge match of basketball resulting in the nemesis character winning. The main character finds a pair of shoes previously owned by basketball legend: Michael Jordan. He uses these shoes (that turn out to give the boy ‘superhuman basketball skills’) not only to achieve stardom but also to get his comeuppance on the court, against his foe. This relates to our idea because our main character (jimmy Hopkins) begins as a social pariah and a general underdog of his school, with a clear bully making his life at school difficult. He then finds a phone with the power to stop time giving him the ability to cause mischief and retaliate. Unfortunately, due to complications, we had to re-film our sequence and were only able to establish the phone’s power and Hopkins’ social misfortune, leaving out the revenge he takes on his bully.

BBFC lesson

In this lesson we looked at clips from a few movies with certificates of either U or PG and decided whether we thought they were either one. We also looked at the BBFC website and researched the criteria for PG and U certificate films. This showed what we could and couldn’t reference in our own children’s film and also (when we were watching the clips) how certain elements of the criteria have changed over time, for example, ‘Watership down’ is comparatively gorier to ‘Harry Potter’ even though it is a U and ‘Harry Potter’ is a PG. This is due to the fact that the BBFC will have had different opinions on what would have been suitable for children in the 1970s to now.