After receiving the results from our questionnaire we sat down together as a group and studied the results, we passed around a lot of ideas with very different themes and approaches but ultimately we settled on focusing on eating disorders and mental health conditions.
Film Synopsis
Our Social Realist film involves themes of cyberbullying, blackmail and eating disorders. Our story features a teenage girl, Faith, from a middle class family dealing with social issues inflicted on her by her peers.
During a brief relationship with one of her classmates, Hugo, Faith is pressured into sending an intimate photo of herself to her boyfriend.
Faith feels uncomfortable in this relationship and regrets ever sending the photo, resulting in her breaking up with him. Although the relationship ends with both Faith and Hugo acting civilly towards one another, Hugo is pressured by his friends to share this photo around.
This results in her humiliation received from peers at school and consequently Faith begins to get cyber bullied and begins feeling self conscious of her body and starts to believe the insults that are being thrown at her.
This leads up to her fight against Anorexia, a more than common issue in teenagers.
By approaching this subject matter in our social realist film we intend to make the audience aware of the consequences cyber bullying can have on impressionable young people.
Our film fits into the social realist genre because it faces real life problems, even though it lacks the raw and gritty effect that we see in many social realist films such as Fish Tank and Shifty, our influence was the film Love Actually. Although this film is unconventional and is Hollywood produced it has taken social realism from a different angle, one that is not seen regularly in this genre of film. However it is still fitting due to the fact that the film revolves around ordinary peoples lifes and their stories.
This is how we have gone about approaching our social realist film.
Themes of our film
Cyber Bullying/Blackmail
Main character: girl being emotionally abused, boyfriend blackmailing/peers
bullying her
Intimate picture, holds it against her. Writing abuse on online photos
Middle class parents are ashamed, peers laugh along and don’t care
POSSIBLE: ex-boyfriends friend; anonymous texting. Messages on social
networking sites
Girl peer pressured by boy to take photo...
boy gets peer pressured by friends to share photo.
Develops eating disorder – gets called ‘Fat/Disgusting’ by ex-boyfriend and
friends: Stressed.
Hoards chocolate > binge > sick.
This triggers a series of emotional and stressful events that lead up to the development of an eating disorder.
Character Descriptions
Main character – Faith, 17, female
Middle class, good family life, supportive parents, healthy relationships. Outsider at school, no true friends, gets taken advantage of by peers.
Short (5ft2), long blonde hair, petite, attractive. Self conscious of figure.
Ex-boyfriend - Hugo, 17, male
Middle class, enjoys skating with his friends, good family life, unlikely match for Faith
Average height (5ft7), short blonde hair, casual clothing.
Possible Shot Types
·
Focus on bare back – bra, undoing clips, pans
out to side – camera on tripod
·
Toilet door – throwing up sound
·
Sitting on laptop – surrounded by empty wrappers
(junk food)
·
Going into the shop and buying lots of junk food
·
Over the shoulder – laptop on social networking
site (private mail)
Close up of carrier bag filled with
chocolate/junk food.
-Lauren Abbott
Choosing a location to film was a decision that we thought long and hard about, it was very important to us all, as we knew that the location is what would make or break the film. We wanted to choose a house with a relatively middle class interior, in an average suburban location, our reasons for choosing this setting was because we wanted to steer away from the typical working class environments that social realist films are usually set in as we felt like it would be intuitive to push the boundaries of the genre and show that these sorts of current issues can happen to anyone, no matter what your social status. The bedroom in which we see the main character, Faith, is simplistic and clean. The reason for choosing such a neutral setting is because we wanted the audience to focus of the emotion of the character and not be distracted by her surroundings. The world map that is on the back wall of the bedroom was placed there to give the impression that the character is fairly intellectual and well travelled, which emphasises the fact that the trauma she goes through can happen to anyone.
