This document provides a pitch presentation for a psychological thriller film focusing on a family obsessed with success and a daughter who starts to go mentally unstable due to pressure. Key plot points include the two daughters in an orchestra, with the mother favoring the eldest, and an accidental death of the eldest daughter by the mother. The target audience is 15-24 year olds, especially females, and the unique selling point is the involvement of an orchestra in the psychological thriller genre. Ideas for the teaser trailer include using orchestral music that builds tension and shots filmed in a dressing room.
2. Genre The genre for our film is a thriller. The sub-genre is a psychological thriller. We decided on this because we think it will be interesting to plan and film. A typical psychological thriller would be set in a remote location and the main character would normally have mental problems in which will unfold throughout the film.
3. Synopsis The idea for our film is to focus on a family who is obsessed with success, There are two parents and two daughters of a similar age. The daughters belong to an orchestra in which the eldest daughter is better than the youngest. The mother acknowledges this and is always praising the eldest daughter and giving little attention to the youngest. Throughout the film we can see the youngest daughter increasingly getting paranoid and ends up going mental. Other members of the orchestra add to the pressure the main character is feeling as they suggest that the elder sister is better than her and more likely to succeed. To add a twist to our film the mother kills the eldest daughter by accident. We are yet to decide why this situation occurred but we have decided that it will be because of one of two reasons; 1.She tries to defuse an argument between the sisters and accidently kills the youngest 2.She tries to kill the youngest daughter and ends up killing her favored daughter by accident.
4. Target audience From our target audience research we did previously,we thought that our target audience should be aged between 15 and 24, and although a high majority or our target audience will be females, we think that it is important to also appeal to the males who may watch our film. When researching our target audience the ages most likely to watch a psychological thriller were 45+, however we want to attract a younger age group to our film. We agreed on our target audience through researching films similar to ours, and as the majority of them were young females it seemed most appropriate for us to follow this. We think our film will appeal to younger people as we will be featuring young actors in it.
5. WIDER CAMPAIGN Effective ways in which we can campaign are through social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter. This is because Facebook is extremely popular in young people, especially our target audience who are very likely to have an account. We believe that using fan pages and advertisements on these websites could help raise awareness for our film as well as traditional forms of advertisements such as posters and billboards.
6. Unique selling point (ucp) The unique selling point for our film is that it involves an orchestra, it is not common for a psychological thriller to involve an extra curricular activity as an element of the character going crazy.
7. Teaser ideas We have been assessing our options for our thriller and come up with a few ideas: The music will be an orchestra, with strong influences of violins. At the beginning of the teaser trailer the music will be soft and as the trailer progresses we will make sure that the music builds up with the tension. Also as the scenes build up we will stop the music and then start it up again quietly for the title or stop it all together with a catch phrase for the film to be read out in dialogue of the main character. We were also keen on the idea of having an image of the main character in the dark practicing her violin by herself at the beginning of the teaser trailer as this will add tension in the sense that the audience will sense that she is alone. Its was also agreed that a lot of our shots for our teaser trailer should be filmed in a dressing room to make it more realistic that the characters are getting ready to perform. We also think it would be a good idea if we use dialogue over the orchestral music.