Research on Film Influences

Film Influences

When writing a synopsis for our short film 'Saving Grace', we had to think of a suitable storyline that would catch the attention of our audience, we decided to do this by making the film revolve around a real issue topic which affects mainly our target audience. Our film is about two teenage girls (typically our target audience, however not gender specific) and their night out around their local town, however things take a turn for the worse and the girls night doesn't go how they had planned. The film involves the subject of Safe drinking and the problems that can occur when drinking or more specifically on a night out, as our main character Grace is spiked and taken away from the nightclub by an unknown character, this is a technique of shock that we use in our film to grab our audiences attention. This is a subject that we believe should be spoken about more and awareness should be raised. 

In the UK, the number of girls that claim to have been spiked or know somebody that has is on the rise, this is due to the easy access of drugs and carelessness when drinking. Little action has been conducted to change this fact however we believe that a short film about this issue would have a greater effect on people and raise awareness. 

A real example of this issue is a 19 year old British student called Jane Khalaf's experience after a night out as she collapsed and suddenly died at Cologne's St. Marien's hospital after telling her friends she thought her drink had been spiked, doctors found traces of amphetamine and ecstasy in her blood. 

An online article written by Rebecca Holman stated that 'The problem is that there are too many grey areas around drink spiking and too much uncertainty'. After the death of the spiking victim Jane, a petition with over 52,000 signatures tried to force the authorities to investigate the case further. We believe that if we create a film that includes the similar scenes that our target audience experience and the unfortunate events that can occur whilst being on a night out, and we include footage that leads the audience to imagine what happens after the main character is taken away by a strange male, we could possibly change the publics view and make people more aware of safe drinking and hopefully change the statistics. 

We will do this by including nightclub scenes and similar scenes which teens experience on a night out and making the audience relate to the characters by showing scenes of the girls getting ready, this will grab the attention of the audience and then the audience will witness our main character being spiked however she doesn't know. The short film will then show the main character Grace getting taken out of the nightclub by a hooded stranger and put into his car as Grace isn't consciously aware of what is happening, we then leave the audience to use their imaginations of what could potentially happen once Grace is taken away. Hopefully this will have an effect on our audience.