Television Production

Somers Town (2008) Somers Town is a comedy-drama set in Somers Town, London, directed by Shane Meadows and produced by Barnaby Spurrier. The film follows Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) and Marek (Piotr Jagiello) and the growth of their friendship over the course of a few days. Tomo is a runaway from Nottingham and Marek is a Polish immigrant who lives with his father who drinks too much. Crew Shane Meadows Somers Town is one of Meadows' feature films. His filmography also includes another inspiration for this project This is England . I'll be looking into Meadows' work in a lot more detail in a separate post. For this production, he opted Paul Fraser as his writer.  Paul Fraser Fraser is often writer for Meadows' projects, as they have been friends since childhood. His other works include Once Upon a Time in the Midlands  and Heartlands . In time that he isn't writing, he is advising on scripts and gives masterclasses on script-writing. In his interview ...

Final Major Project. For this project, I'll be developing a pre-production package to begin my final project of 3rd year. I will need to develop a pitch, script, budget, schedule, casting, locations, and possibly a trailer. I will be working with Esme as a pair, because we know we want to work together on the final project and we make a Director and Showrunner team. Ideas The ideas that we have considered are all revolving around a short film platform of 15-20 minutes. We have both put forward ideas for the plot that generally focus on human interaction. Podcast One of my ideas was focused around a plot device. I was curious about a character that keeps a podcast (which could be used as a voiceover) that narrates the plot. I didn't have much of an idea for the plot and so this quickly went down the drain, although I'll keep the plot device idea in mind. AI Esme had the idea of an AI character and their human counterpart living through the end of the world....

Evaluation. I am happy with the outcome of Deadline, and during production I was able to make a lot of progress on my script writing skills and organisational skills. I will be addressing what went well, what went wrong, and what I've learned to take forward into my future projects. What worked? I am very happy overall with how the script turned out. I was not confident in my script writing skills when I begun the project and this was the aspect of production that was worrying me the most. I have also only ever written comedy one other time, and I don't watch comedy on TV often, so I was concerned that I wouldn't be well-versed into how to write something like this. However, I'm happy with how it turned out. As it was aimed towards an audience similar to my age, I was able to use my own sense of humor and events that have happened to me as inspiration for my writing, and this also meant I was able to relate to my characters more. They were also a similar age to...

Casting. The casting process involves many stages of working through actors and trying to find people that fit the characters best, particularly with their personality, because the casting and characters is what I focused on for this project. My Actors To begin with casting, I used Mandy.com and Starnow.com to advertise the project and garner interest from local actors. I wrote a detailed but concise advert, explaining each character, what the shoot will consist of and when it will be. I then received responses to the advert from actors and I could decide who out of the applicants would fit the characters the best. In the end, I cast Abi Saddington as Fern because of her showreel, that showed her to be a great actor with a lot of versatility, but she had also played characters like Fern before. Secondly I cast John McArthur as Mac because of the audition tape that he sent me. He seemed a little bit shy/ reserved, which I thought would be perfect for the character of Mac, and I ...

Pre production. As part of the showrunner role, I am required to arrange the pre production paperwork for Deadline. To do this, I have used templates as well as research in order to aid the best and most effective working practice when creating the pre production work. The paperwork Emails (Click to expand) I have attached examples of my email communication with the actors as it represents how I was trying to fulfill my role with professionalism and ensuring the actors knew what would be happening at all times. Google Drive (Click to expand) This is the organisation of the paperwork that the team used. My Input For this project I took on the role of producer, which meant that I was responsible for all of the pre-production paperwork. I organised all of the work seen here, printing, and distributing amongst the crew and cast. To maintain organisation, I made paperwork packs for all the actors and 2 for the crew so that they could use them...

Character Study. In order to develop my characters in a way that can be recognised by the audience, I'm going to look into characters that I admire to break down how they are represented to the audience. I am going to be focusing on 2 characters: Scott Pilgrim from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World , and Juno from Juno . I have chosen these characters because they are quite exaggerated characters, and their personalities are made very clear to the audience. Both Scott Pilgrim and Juno also share some similarities to the characters I'm developing for Deadline. Scott Pilgrim Scott Pilgrim is the main protagonist of comedy-comic book-style film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World . The film is based on the graphic novel of the same name and follows Scott battling off the 7 exes of Ramona Flowers to win her love. Scott's character is an awkward nerd-type but with unintentional wit. We can tell this physically because he wears t-shirts with references to arcade games. He also uses...

Scripting. Scripting for any screenplay is generally the same process, with some formatting changes. However, there are also 'rules' around how to write for short film. I want to improve on my writing skills, and to do so, I'll be researching script writing specifically for short film. Short films Screencraft points out that short films are the most important moment in a character's life. "These minutes, hours or days decide everything." [1] With short film, because you don't have long to put across your point, you have to really prioritise every action. That the character does, and everything they say. everything has to move the story on. They also mention, although it's obvious, that film is a visual medium. It can be easy to forget to make a script about what the audience will see, because as a writer you're focused on what will be read. However, showrunners are responsible for all of these aspects of production, so it works well to ...