Life's a pitch...

Thursday 2nd December

Today we made our pitches for our short films to a panel containing our lecturers, Phil Purves, Tim Tarrent and Lesley Gittens. Overall I feel that the pitch went very well. They all seemed very positive in terms of the twist and said that they had not seen this done before.

Philip Purves recommended that I research the film 'All That Jazz' and the character Angelique, who is a kind of Angel of Death to the character Gideon. A bit like the character of 'Poppy' to my main character.

One concern was whether or not the audience will feel empathy for my protagonist. Was there any way that he doesn't have to be homeless? Is it stereotyping the homeless in saying that they all hit rock-bottom so wind up doing heroin?

I started to think of any other ways that I could portray him. Maybe I could show his downfall into drugs, but start him off as a reasonably successful man.

I racked my brains to try and come up with a different scenario, which was incredibly difficult when you already have an image of what the film will look like in your head. I decided to draft a script portraying the main guy as a reasonably successful businessman and his downfall into drugs. This seemed to be going well but then it seemed somewhat long-winded and a bit difficult to portray someones downfall into such a hard drug so quickly. Our time limit is 12 minutes and it seems like a lot to tell an audience in such a short space of time.

So I am going to stick with my idea of having him as a homeless guy, but I want it to seem like he is incredibly vulnerable and very new to this. I am going to have him take out a picture of him with either a girlfriend or a family portrait, reminiscing on better times. Making the audience realise that he has made mistakes but he still has a family that loves him, but he feels he cannot return to them. I'd like to leave a bit of a question mark on his family background though so I don't want to focus too much on that but feel it will be good to start off on.