Our Film Idea

Our film is typically British because our main character is of a white British ethnicity, she comes from a working class area of the south east. She is adopted and looses her mother which makes her stand to other people. She has a lower social status in society to emphasise the fact she has had a hard childhood. This represents her economic and emotional hardship. We researched Kidulthood to gain a better understand teenagers struggling in society. It showed us the conventional structure of social realism trailers. Our character isn’t generically a hero but as the film progresses the audience builds a relationship with her and understands her sense of achievement.

Characters Lily: Our main character is a 17 year old white British girl, she didn’t know her birth mother but has been brought up by a foster mother since a very young age. She has been very interested in boxing and martial arts since a young age and has wanted to pursue this interest but this has been supressed by her family and the people around her. She comes from a working class background and attends a typical city college. She was previously bullied at school and that has had a big impact on her self esteem and her self concept. she is a typical ‘tomboy’ which also contributes to her being marginalised in society. Tom: Is a 17 year old white British boy. He is a potential love interest to Lily and his background never gets explored in the film. He introduces Lily to boxing and becomes close to her.

Act 1 Our main characters foster mum dies when the character is 17; she is struggling to cope with the death of her foster mum and has to go back into care. Because of the death it is interfering with her college work and she can’t handle college at times so runs out. She is seen crying by a boy who talks to her and offers her the chance to go boxing to help handle her current situation. She thinks this is a stupid idea and thinks nothing of it.

Act 2 She is told to clean out her foster mum’s house so it can be sold; whilst she is doing this she finds letters from her birth mother all piled up together, when she reads them she finds out her mum has wanted to meet her for a while and is sorry for putting her up for adoption and her birth mother leaves her a phone number and a photo of herself. The letters make our main character think about starting the boxing. She talks to the boy who gave her the boxing leaflet and he takes her to a boxing lesson, she enjoys the boxing and continues it. She soon becomes good friends with the boy and it introduces a slight love interest, the boy becomes her trainer as well.

Act 3 She starts to go out a lot more with the boy out of college and the gym. One day when they are out they find a poster about a female boxing competition, the boy encourages her to enter the competition which she has only 1 month to train for. As she trains for boxing she develops as a person and becomes more relaxed and confident, so she decides to call her birth mother but when she hears her voice she puts the phone down because she doesn’t know what to say. A few days before the competition she calls her mum and leaves her a voice message telling her about the competition and how she wants to meet her real mum. In one of her fights she then sees her mum in the crowd and wins the fight.

Settings As our character is from a working class background we are going to be using realistic settings from a typical working class area. We will use locations like the beach to film her training for boxing. In typical social realism they close ups and extreme close ups to show emotion of characters, we will be doing in our trailer for example when her foster mum dies. We will be using POV shots so that the audience can form a relationship with the character. In Train spotting they use POV shots to show what they are experiencing.

Shots We plan to do match on actions shots from when our character was younger to the current time. Our trailer will use fast pace cuts when showing clips of boxing to create excitement for the audience.