Media project #1

For my A2 project, I have decided to do the following brief:

A promotion package for a new film, to include a trailer, together with two of the following:

• A website homepage for the film
• A film magazine front cover featuring the film
• A poster for the film

I have deicded to to create a film magazine front cover and a poster for the film.

IDEAS:

I have come up with 2 ideas on regards of plots for my trailer. This has proved to be fairly tricky, as only critical points of the plot appear in the trailer.

My ideas follow a theme. They are as follows:

• A girl dreams of entering the Olympics and has trained for years to compete. She has an accident and all the training and preparation she has done has been for naught. She meets a boy who is disabled and has the same dream as her and has trained in basketball. He offers to help train her, so she still has a chance to go to the Olympics/Paralympics. After much training, they both get selected for the Paralympic team, but their opposing team in the final is intimidating, bigger and better. The game starts off badly, but after breaking down their strategy, the two young friends help their team to win gold.
• A young man gets offered a job in the FBI and has to move across the country. While driving across the country, he is involved in an accident and left paralysed. The other man involved in the accident is someone he knows from school. They hear about a programme that may cure them. It works for one of them, but not the other. The programme turns one man into a superhero, and the other man becomes the villian. I have decided not to use this storyline as superhero films often require a lot of SFX and I do not have the facilities to create them.

I have decided that I want to focus on representation of disability. It goes against the 'typical' conventions of films and disabled actors are underrepresented in the world of cinema.

I have started to research several films in the RomCom category. The films I have researched are as follows:

• Crazy Stupid Love - This film features a couple who's relationship is under strain. They get divorced and the male lead (Steve Carell) finds a new woman. He later realises he should have fought harder to keep his wife. There are a lot of comical moments in the film too, to balance between the sombre and the funny.

• A Little Bit of Heaven - This film is about Marley (Kate Hudson) who lives life to the full, even after she finds out she has terminal cancer. She begins a relationship with her doctor, who has a hardened exterior and is impressed by the way she accepts her fate and makes sure they make the most of the time they have left together.

Keeping in with the basketball theme, I have found some trailers for basketball films to use as inspiration. The trailers include the following:

• Coach Carter - This film features Samuel L. Jackson as a basketball coach who begins to train a team of deliquent high school students. He is dismayed by the poor attitudes of his players as well as their dismal play performance and sets about to change both. He immediately imposes a strict regime typified in written contracts that include stipulations for respectful behavior, a dress code and good grades as requisites to being allowed to participate. The initial resistance from the boys is soon dispelled as the team under Carter's tutelage becomes a undefeated competitor in the games.

• Glory Road - Josh Lucas stars as a basketball coach for a high school team which has only 5 black players to begin with. He coaches them and the white members drop out to make way for the first all-black basketball team.

• Like Mike - Calvin Cambridge lives in an orphanage and has always been pushed around by the other kids. One night, he finds a pair of sneakers with the initials 'MJ' penned inside. He starts to wear them and finds he has superior skill in basketball. He becomes the newest member of an NBA team.

All of these films have inspired my own trailer. I am going to use the second plot idea about a girl who ends up on the GB Paralympic basketball team, thanks to a kind-hearted boy whom she meets and trains with after an accident which left her paralysed.

I have looked at the typical codes and conventions of RomCom films. Typically, there is a boy and a girl who meet and eventually fall in love. In some RomComs, the protagonists marry and (sometimes) divorce. 

Sometimes the male lead chases after a girl who is unattainable. With this storyline, the girl often gives in and agrees to go out with him and ends up falling in love with him.