Love Lockdown - Preliminary Synopsis

Characters

Alicia - Pregnant with Jermaine's baby,broken hearted and acts irrationaly upon being informed of Ashley's infidelity. Takes advantage of best friend Jermaine who has had feelings for her for a long time and is left with the guilt of living her life knowing that her closest friend is in prison for her actions.

Jermaine - Lovesick Teen, infatuated with Alicia, so much so that he takes the fall for her and attends prison for a crime that she commited.

Ashley - Alicia's boyfriend and father of her unborn baby, cheats on her with Shanique, runs away when caught

Shaniqua - Has an affair with Ashley and is killed by Alicia upon being caught


Love Lockdown

Ashley and Alicia have been in a long term relationship of which they have gone through to the serious sides relating to sexual behaviour. Unfortunately, due to unforseen circumstances, Alicia has become pregnant with Jermaine's baby.

Alicia is left upsset and unsure of what to do and so she confides in her best friend Jermaine who advises her to inform Ashley of her current state. Taking his advice, Alicia calls Ashley notifying him that she needs to tell him something important. Ashley, acting incredibly suspicious tells Alicia that he is busy and that he will call back later. Ashley drops the phone but does not end the phonecall allowing Alicia to hear him interacting with her worst enemy Shaniqua. It becomes clear to Alicia once listening to the innuendo between the pair that Ashley is cheating on her.

Overwhelmed with emotion, not only has she just found out that she is pregnant but that the love of her life is lying to her, Alicia proceeds in quickly running to Ashley's house in order to release her anger. Jermaine warns her not to do anything stupid and follows slowly behind her.

Alicia arrives at Ashley's house, for him to answer the door and act like nothing is going on. Alicia, not falling for his tricks barges past him and proceeds upstairs to confront Shaniqua. Ashley runs after her upstairs leaving the door wide open. The neighbours hear the screaming and shouting from inside the house, and upon hearing the racket, Jermaine begins jogging to Ashley's house.

Once at the door, Alicia runs out with her hands coated in blood. She expresses that she does not know what she has done and seeks comfort from Jermaine who tells her that everything will be alright. Sirens are heard and the pair split up to run away and meet at Alicia's. Alicia arrives at home before Jermaine, and washes the knife used to kill Shaniqua. Jermaine does not turn up.

Jermaine hands himself in for murder for the sake of Alicia and her child. Alicia has to live with the guilt until Jermaine is released whilst Jermaine hopes that the sacrifice that he has made for Alicia will result in their combined love once his sentence is up.

Ashley disappears from the area and refuses to take any responsibility for his unborn baby.

Alicia suffers from hallucinations and insomnia and goes to visit Jermaine in prison. Their relationship develops and Alicia delivers a beautiful baby boy and names him after Jermaine. When about to leave the hospital, Jermaine shows up in the doorway. The pair hug and live together happily ever after.

The Targeted Audience

Being a group filled with teenage girls, it seemes most sensible to create a film to appeal to an audience of similar ages. Therefore, our target audience are teenagers aged from 14-19. The events of our film are likely to attract a male dominated audience due to the gang violence and prison scenes but there is also an appeal to young teenage girls as we see the main female character struggling to come to terms with teenage pregnancy and the infidelity of her boyfriend. The occurances of the opening sequence are all relatable and our target audience will most likey know someone or have personally been involved in the situations.

Sugarhouse Lane is a british film starring Adam Deacon. This film has a target audience for ages 14-19 and has helped us to understand what we must include and how we must film in order to attract our prospective audience.

In terms of venue, we must base our film in familiar areas such as, open roads, public parks, highstreets etc. When scripting, we must ensure that the language used is colloquial and identical to the way in which urban teenagers speak nowadays using present slang and gestures. People of authority will have posher voices than the younger ones, signifying the differences in agegroups.

As it is an Urban Drama, the scenes will be based in a lower classed environment. It is an inner city film, therefore the cast that we will used will be of mixed ethnicities to symbolise the variety of culture that lies in cities.

Keeping the content simple and understable yet interesting will allow us to maintain the focus and interest of our target audience and possibly attract an older audience.

The scene below from Sugarhouse Lane depicts an excellent example of how our opening scene should be. The language used is relatable, there is a mixture of ethnicity and the occurances of the scene are common events that occur in inner city life.

The Influences

As a group we are greatly influenced by British Urban Dramas. Films such as Kidulthood have played a key role towards allowing us to develop the idea of creating the opening sequence of a dramatic thriller. Dramas incorporate real life situations with surreal not so ordinary events. Kidulthood follows the life of teenagers over a course of weeks. The trials that we as an audience view once following the teenager’s allow us to empathise with the characters. Although we are only doing an opening sequence, we would like to emulate the intense emotions that are expressed in the opening scene of Kidulthood. The isolated scenes in which we see clues as to what different characters are doing are essential in building up suspense in our sequence. In order for the audience to have a brief idea of past events to help them work out the hidden elements of our film, we will show flashbacks of prior events. Flashbacks were used effectively in the infamous Forrest Gump as an alternate method to tell the tale of Forrest’s life up until the time that it is now.
Along with this, the movie Seven Pounds also begins at the ending, leaving the viewers to watch the movie and understand why Will Smith ends up as he does in the movie. Many movies use Pre Credit Sequences to grab the attention of the audience before boring them with the credentials of their movie, we will also use this. An example of a movie that uses this element is the movie Cube. We as the audience are immediately viewing the male as he travels around this strange warehouse, when he is sliced into cubical pieces, the name of the film Cube appears, and the viewer notices the connotations. We would like to end our pre credit sequence with our male actor standing in his prison uniform and soon after the title of the film, Love Lockdown, will appear and connotations will be able to be made.

The Opening Sequence Of Cube Is Below

As Preliminary Project

Our preliminary task was inspired by a nail varnish (of my very own, that I purchased from H&M) with the colour named Midnight Passion. Immediately upon hearing the adjectives used for the nail varnish, we came up with the idea to base our task around a romantic comedy. The play on words in order to seduce the male actor, allowed us to build suspense as to what the midnight passion may actually entail. The close up of our female character (Nikkie Badejo-Myself) , revealed the comical side and the actual connotation of the midnight passion with the use of my seductive wink.

Overall, the preliminary task was successful. We had a variety of shots and transitions which coincided well with the underlying theme of our video. Our favourite aspect of our clip, was the match on action shot in which the viewer sees Nikkie (myself) entering through the door and soon after this, they are again shown her walking towards the male character as the door shuts. Unfortunately, we did encounter some technical difficulties in relation to framing. When shooting the shot/reverse shots during the conversations between the male and female character, we failed to block out exterior distractions such as lockers and tables that we did not want in the frame. Luckily, we were able to disguise this with a special effect which ellipsed our shots with a black border.

Due to noticing our pros and cons, we have analysed and created solutions to our framing problems. When filming our opening scene, we will ensure that before each clip we have a clear view of exactly what is in the frame. If we confirm that all frames are perfectly planned and executed, we are positive that we will produce an excellent Opening Scene.

As Media Studies Project (Introduction)

The set brief for our Video project is to create the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes. This blog will document the pre-production, production and evaluation stages of this project.