Short Film Planning: Audience, Purpose,Theme and Narrative

For the planning of the short film our group all came together to discuss what the purpose of our short film would be. By considering what audience we will be targeting it helped our group come up with what the possible purpose of a short film could be.

In terms of using a demographic profile to discover which audience we actually wanted it can be split into different categories. Some examples of these are:

• Age
• Gender
• Race
• Location

From some of these categories our group was able to decide what possible purposes of our films could be by using some of these categories. The purpose of a short film can be to self-promote, experiment or to educate a particular audience. In the case of our group not wanting to self-promote wanting to educate was the most plausible option. By deciding on the purpose of educating we as a group were able to come up with some audiences using demographic profiling. 

For example, our audience age would be 15+ where we would be able to talk about topics that someone those ages and above may face. However, that is not to say that the age rating for the short film will be a 15. In terms of gender, race and location our group decided from a list of choices that we would want to make these accessible to all; especially in terms of educating the audience therefore there would not be any restriction to it in that sense. 

The image above presents some of our groups ideas that we have come up with. From the ideas sheet we came up with some possible themes for the short film some being:

• Romantic-Comedy
• Causality
• Social-Realism 

After discussing the possible themes some of the narrative ideas where able to come into place such as those being whether the narrative would be linear or non-linear for example. The vast majority of it going with the linear approach.