Viewer Profile

This is Charlie, he is 19 years old and enjoys comedy films and watching videos online. When he isn't at University, he is meeting up with friends to watch a film or play games together online. Overdoze appeals to him as he enjoys the comedy and likes feel-good films as he finds them inspirational, he wants to see how Geoff's life will change and he is curious about lucid dreaming. 

He fits our target audience of males aged 16 to 30 so this is the type of person we are hoping to aim our film toward and appeal to.

Survey Analysis

Our survey analysis gave us a range of results which helped us focus our film and the target audience for the film. The first result was about the gender of the person answering our survey, this helped us understand who to aim our film at and which gender may enjoy it more. From our results we can see that 50% of the people who answered it were male and 46.6% of people who answered were female. The remaining percentage did not want to answer. This helped us market the film as we came to the conclusion that our film could appeal to both a male and female audience so we shouldn't focus on just a male audience. 

The next conclusion we could draw from the facts was from the ages of the people who answered, the majority of people were in the age bands of 15-20 and 21-25 meaning we should focus our film at people aged 15-25. This worked well as the target audience we had in mind was about our own age or from ages 15 to mid twenties which we decided most films similar to this one were aimed at and our data seems to support this.

Our next question asked about the interviewee's favourite films, the most popular answers were Seth Rogen films including 'This is the End' and 'Ted'. This are both comedy films based off Seth Rogen's humour, something everyone in my group shares and finds funny so we will be using this as inspiration when creating our film.

How important are these elements in order to make a successful comedy film? This question helped highlight what people would like to see in our film trailer and what they expect in films like ours. Our voters decided that character types, the actors and the storyline where the most important aspects so we considered this when thinking of ideas for the trailer. For character types, we decided to try and create distinctive roles for each of our characters and further the character behind our main character who we named Geoff as it sounded like a normal name which also sparked humour in our group as Geoff seemed like such a normal name for such a quirky character. For the actors used we obviously could not afford to hire professional, well-known actors but we could think of someone who immediately fit our idea of the role so we decided to use him to play the role of Geoff. Finally, the story. As story seemed to be an important part of a successful film we were glad that our storyline was unique and we struggled to think of a film like ours in narrative. We liked the fact that our storyline stood out and didn't feel reused or overdone. This was good as it meant that the narrative would appeal to people and hopefully draw in audiences.

This idea is supported by the fact that the majority of the participants in our survey found our synopsis appealing, meaning our unique narrative could attract audiences and appeal to people, increasing our chances of success.

Film and Character Ideas

"Geoff is a normal guy in his early 20's who hates his job and hates his life even more. He has a horrible boss, annoying neighbour, no money and no girlfriend. In a bid to impress a girl he learns to lucid dream which changes his life; he can now control what happens to him in this new dream reality. This quickly becomes an addiction as he loves the power he has in the dream world and slowly loses the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction. What could possibly go wrong?"

This is the current working synopsis for our film "Overdoze". The name is intended to be a play on words of overdose as our character overdoses on lucid dreaming and after overdoing it and lucid dreaming too often losing the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction. This was intended to create humour through the play on words and also subtly suggest the theme of sleep in the film by using 'doze' instead of dose. The screenshot above is the current title we are using at the end of our spot trailer. I added the little z's at the end of the E to enforce the idea that sleep plays an important role in our film and to add some more character to the title.

Geoff is the main character in our film, we follow his life as he is overloaded with work from his boss and is ignored by his fellow colleagues until he becomes lonely and bored, tired of his day to day until he becomes sad and reaches a low in his life. He's had his eye on a girl he knows for a while and has a massive crush on her but is always too awkward to talk to her or ask her out. After finding out the girl he likes is a hippie and is trying to learn to lucid dream, he attempts to learn it himself in order to create something between them that could draw them close together. Somehow he manages to crack it and discovers a wonderful world in his dreams where he can control his life and replay scenarios where he has been picked on or made to feel useless in real life, changing what happens to make himself more important and a more confident person. This starts to impact his real life as he builds his confidence and starts making friends and changing his life so he is happy. He punches his horrible boss and kicks his neighbour's dog, even asking out the girl of his dreams. The lucid dreaming impacts his life positively as he improves his real life quality by building his confidence in this fake reality.

Distributors Research

A distributor is responsible for the marketing of a film, the distribution company are responsible for advertising the film, setting the release date and decided which platforms it will be released on and at what times. The distribution company normally owns a range of subsidiaries which are involved in the distribution process, for example, a chain of cinemas or an independent viewing house. In our case, Columbia is owned by Sony who are a huge company who own a range of companies that would be helpful in distribution including Sony Entertainment Network and the PlayStation store, these will help as they can sell the film over the PlayStation network store. Also the Song Entertainment Network could distribute our film onto the televisions, computers, home cinema systems, phones and more in order to reach a large target audience.

I have chosen Columbia Pictures for my distribution company, while researching the various companies who have been involved in films similar to the one we are hoping to create I found out that Sony Columbia were responsible for The Interview, Pineapple Express, The Social Network and many more films which have a similar sense of humour, storyline or characters to the film which we are creating a trailer for. I watched the Columbia Pictures title and decided it would fit with the trailer, when watching the Columbia title I instantly recognised it due to the fact that the Columbia logo has been used in lots of films for many years. I think this

is good for our film as the well known and widely recognised Columbia logo has become associated with quality films and seeing it before our trailer could make people assume a certain quality.

Magazine Cover Analysis - Tron

Poster Analysis - Shaun of the Dead

The poster for Shaun of the Dead is a little more simplistic than the poster for The Wolf of Wall Street with the only busy part of the poster being the zombies crowded together behind the doors. Having the zombies pressed up against the door like this suggests that the person viewing the poster is behind the doors, safe from the zombies, surviving the apocalypse along with the cast and stars from the film. This makes the viewer feel involved in the action and makes an effective poster. The title is in a large bold font with a zombie hand forming the 'A' in 'DEAD' to make the title more unique and show one of the most obvious themes of the film, the zombies. 
Underneath the title is the tagline, "A romantic comedy, with zombies." This title uses juxtaposition as zombies do not fit in a stereotypical romantic comedy, this creates humour and entices the viewer. The question "Ever felt like you were surrounded by zombies?" Is a rhetorical question to make the viewer try to relate to the film. 

The colours used consist of mainly dark reds, blacks and browns. This fits with the theme of the film as it is meant to appear like a horror film, the genre it is parodying. This creates an eerie feel and makes the film seem dark and disturbing, as the creators are well known for humour the audience can recognise that this is a parody of a zombie film and not a genuine horror film about zombies, helped by the humourous tagline and the actor standing awkwardly in amongst the zombies.

Poster Analysis - The Wolf of Wall Street

The poster for the film 'The Wolf of Wall Street' immediately came to mind when thinking of movie posters as it had stood out to me when the movie was released. I thought this would fit our film as it is all about the main character's mundane, boring office life and I thought of ideas regarding my own film, mimicking and parodying the style of this poster. I thought of doing two posters in one, showing an identical image very similar to this one with the protagonist standing in his office with people working and his boss shouting at him as he stands looking unhappy and then doing a version where he is in the same position in the same location but in his dreams. This would differ as he would be smiling happily and his boss would be handing him money or offering him a promotion and he had an attractive girl next to him as the office behind him was on fire and his coworkers gone. This is supposed to show how he resents his office job and coworkers and how he can live out his dreams when he is asleep even if his dreams are unrealistic.

The colours used in this poster are very friendly with bright yellows, blues, whites and reds breaking up the otherwise grey of the office to show excitement at his achievement and the light-hearted happiness the viewer is made to feel. At the bottom of the poster we see the information regarding the cast, production and even release date. This is a common part of most posters as it gives the viewer the information needed to find out more about the film, the people in it or any of the people or companies involved in making it. Becoming more common is the usage of social media accounts so the viewer can follow the film and view exclusive material from behind the scenes.