PLANNING: ADVANCED PRODUCTION

1. The name of our film: Level Zero
2. The name of our Production Company and our co-production companies: Ten Pin Productions and PPProductions
3. The name of the director that will appear in our trailers: Preesha P 
4. The name of the 2-3 main actors that will appear in our trailers: Tom B, Preesha P
5. (Optional)  "From the director of..."  Criminal Faces
6. The names of the film festivals where our film will be screened (more festival names here): Edinborough Film Festival and London BFI Film Festival
7. Pull quotes from reviews etc; wording: "GRIPPING"
8. Our location recce - take photos and collate in an attractive way + written explanation
9. Our target audience - Done individually
10. Social groups and issues in our film - Tom
11. Our props list - photos + stereotypes + clothing - Preesha
12. Our social media - Preesha (Instagram), Tom (Twitter)
13. Our music - we researched (this type of music) as the background track... and narrowed down our choice to include...
14. Our call sheets are being written by Preesha (regarding the residential off-site shoot) and Tom (regarding the poker game)
15. Make your storyboard - including shot types and diagrams of the action that will be seen on screen

Planning: Target Audience and Similar Films

       Kezia Williams of Entertainment One UK expressed the importance of a "comp list" in the distribution process of a film within her Teaching Trailers FDA course.

She went into further detail highlighting the importance of knowing your audience. She asks questions like "what drives them to the cinema" and "what interests do they have", all provoking questions to ask about our own audience. To do this, Williams says that it is important to look to other, similar films in order to see what types of audiences were interested in the film.

 KEZIA WILLIAMS: Really important to understand who your audience is and what motivates them and what’s going to interest them and drive them to go to the cinema. So you start, often, by examining similar films that have been released in the past– comparable films is a way in which we refer to them in the industry– and create a set that we can then look back at data so we can look at lots of different data and do research, really, on those comparable films to identify who the audience was on those films. So it might be that we look at demographic data and think about, did it skew more male or more female? What’s the age group that it appeals to?

0:46Skip to 0 minutes and 46 secondsDoes it have multiple different audiences that that can appeal to? And there’s lots and lots of cinema-going trends that you can dig into from that comparable set. We’ll also look at box office data to understand regionality, to look at the cinema-going skew– so did more people go to a certain cinema chain to see these comparable films? Right down to which cinemas performed. So it might be that there’s a cinema in London that had a fantastic box office share, and that’s an important aspect for us to consider. And then once you really understand who the audience on those comparable films were, you can start to talk about the differences and similarities between those films and the film that you’re working on.

FDA information on Gender and Age in relation to preferred genre:  

COMP LIST

Speed (Dir. Jan de Bont) : A young police officer must prevent a bomb exploding aboard a city bus by keeping its speed above 50 mph. The high intensity, high stakes action that Speed pushes forward through it's visuals and sound is what I'd like to capture in our own production. It similarly takes the format of rooting it's entire plot around one core action sequence, which in this case is them driving the bus at high speeds in a busy city.

Baby Driver (Dir. Edgar Wright) : Baby Drivers protagonist is depicted in the same way as would work brilliantly in our own format. His innocence and good intentions within a world of crime make his character highly endearing and give him a highly engaging character arc which show him progressively standing up for himself and taking charge. 

American Sniper (Dir. Clint Eastwood): American Snipers structure well compliments its action, this is most evident in the trailer, in which while its subject is nothing of importance, its cut-outs into scenes that provide context and enrich the character it makes the action highly engaging.