Planning: Casting

For my short biopic film trailer, I will need to find actors that fit the roles represented in my trailer about the story of an aspiring young footballer. Ideally, for my main actor, I would want to find someone who has a good level of footballing ability because there will be a lot of shots showing the young footballer playing youth matches and 5-a-side matches with his friends. Furthermore, there will be shots of him super imposed in real-life football stadiums such as Old Trafford, Santiago Bernabeu and Camp Nou, therefore, the actor would have to be quite skillfull and have decent footballing ability to make the trailer seem believable and realistic.  There will be need to between 3-4 more actors to show a close and strong bond between the main character and 3-4 other characters.

Due to the fact that I am filming the young footballer from when he is a young child to his late teenage years, I will need to have 2 actors for my main character role. The first actor will have to be aged between 7-10 as the first part of the trailer will show the main character as a child playing 5-a-side football with his childhood friends. However, I would have to get consent from the actors' parents and the actor himself in order for me to be able to film him for my biopic trailer. Ideally, the two actors playing the main character would have to look similar, despite being different ages, to make the biopic trailer seem believable and true to life. For the 2nd actor, they have be a male aged 16-18 as in the later part of the biopic trailer, he is coming through youth team football. I have thought that the actor best for this role would be Rossi Salvatore as I need someone athletic and skillfull to play the role of a young up-and-coming footballer. This will also be the part where he meets another young promising player coming through the youth system. He ends up befriending him and they also become teammates later on in the biopic. I feel like the target audience would be able to connect with and relate to the main character as he is a young male trying to be successful.

The 2nd actor that I will need for my biopic short film is also someone between the ages of 16-18. This is because I need them to play another young player coming through the youth system alongside my main character. They will also have to have good footballing ability but it is not essential as they are only the secondary character in the trailer. Furthermore, the other youth player/friend of the main character will only appear during the youth football part of the trailer and the later stages of the biopic trailer. This is because the main character first meets the secondary character when they are starting youth team football. Therefore, the main character will be playing with different kids, which are his childhood friends, when he is a young child as he hasn't yet met the secondary character. The actor will also have to be able to represent a strong friendship between him and the main character.

The 3rd actor that will be in my biopic short film will have to be a female aged between 17-18. This is because I need a teenage girl to play the love interest of the young aspiring footballer.

The 4th actor that will be in my biopic will have to be a male aged between 30-45. This is because I need an older person to play the youth team coach as they will be a character that gives the young players tough love and guidance through out the youth team football part of the trailer. This is up until the 2 main characters get offers to do trials for a Premier League club due to their excellent form with a youth team. He then wishes them good luck in the trials and gives them his goodbyes. I feel this would be an accurate but stereotypical representation of a youth team coach and it would allow teenage boys that have played for football  to be able to relate to what is being portrayed in my biopic.

The 5th actor in my biopic trailer will have to play the manager of the Premier League club that the 2 main characters will end up playing for. He will have to be a strong motivator and someone that inspires the players to work hard for their team and produce great performances that will help the whole team to succeed. He will appear in the later parts of the trailer when the main characters are playing at an elite level.

Other smaller parts such as the main character's childhood friends, youth team mates and team mates at the Premier League club will be played by anybody that can be available at the time. Extras such as the crowd at Premier League matches and real-life players will be super-imposed in the short biopic film. I feel like having real-life players would allow the audience to see some of their favourite footballers and making the short biopic film seem realistic.

Planning: Choosing Locations

In order for my biopic trailer to be as realistic and effective as possible, I will need to choose locations that best fit my narrative and seem believable in the case of my footballer biopic short film trailer.  For the early parts of the trailer, I will need to find football pitches in a rural environment to give the youth team football a grassroots and real feel.

One of the first locations I thought would be most suitable would be the playing fields just outside Kings Sutton. This is because it has a full size football pitch and goals with nets. However, I may have to ask permission to use the football field from the local football club. I will also have to make sure that I conduct my filming at a time when the local team aren't playing. Therefore, timing my filming days will be crucial in order to use this location to film.

The second possible location that I could use for my biopic trailer could be Astrop Road playing fields in Middleton Cheney. There is a lot more green space and football pitches that I could film at rather than Kings Sutton. It may be easier to film in Middleton Cheney due to the amount of space I have, however, I may still have to get permission to film from the land owners or football club owners. I would still have to time my filming days because the local football club play there every Saturday or Sunday, therefore, it will be crucial for my project to be able to use one or two of these locations for my biopic.

The third possible location that I could use for my biopic could be the exterior of the Brackley Football Club Stadium, St James Park, which will be used for the part of the trailer displaying the main character's youth football career. However, I wouldn't be able to use the pitch to film my trailer as the pitch has to be done by the groundsman in preparation for club fixtures on certain weekdays and Saturdays or Sundays. I can film the exterior of the stadium as long as I can get written permission
from the club officials to film the stadium on non-matchdays so there are no members of the public that don't want to be filmed. I could also use the five-a-side pitch next to the ground to film parts of the trailer when the character is training as a youth player or when he is playing with his friends as a young boy. Despite that, I would still have to get permission from the pitch owners to film on their property for my biopic trailer.

Mood Board

  This a Mood Board displaying all of my initial ideas for my short film football biopic trailer following the journey of a young footballer on his path to glory and success on a European and World stage by competing in the Premier League, Champions League and World Cup.

Planning: Choosing an Idea

For my final A2 Media Studies project, I have chosen to do a trailer for a short biopic film following the story of a young footballer on his path to success in the Champions League, Premier League and at the World Cup for the English National Team. The piece will be called 'World at Your Feet'. I chose this Idea over the Hip-Hop and RnB music videos because I felt I could be much more creative with a short biopic film trailer as music videos tend to have stricter conventions that must be followed. With this idea, I have a lot more freedom with what I can do and furthermore, I can either follow certain conventions or I can choose to subvert them for dramatic effect

This will allow me to develop new skills that I may not have had knowledge of during last year's AS Coursework and it could also allow me to display my skills in a different type of genre that I have not had previous experience of exploring and using for a project. I feel doing a biopic would be more challenging than my other ideas because I have to find the perfect actor suitable for the role I want to portray and also the camerawork and editing I would have to do will be more complicated.

I also feel that the target audience I would have to cater for may be different to the target audiences of my music video ideas. This is because the audience for my biopic will most likely be male football fans and on the other hand people that like rap/hip-hop may not like football as much as the intended target market of my biopic trailer. Therefore, my intended target audience will be more likely to enjoy my biopic as they are fans of football and would be probably understand and connect with the story better. However, I could incorporate RnB beats to match the high intensity and tension of being a professional footballer. This could make the trailer appeal to people that enjoy RnB but aren't fans of football and could make them enjoy it. Finally, the trailer would be perfect for people that are both fans of football and RnB because it would combine their two of their favourite things.

My second best idea was to do a hip-hop/rap video aimed at teenagers aged between 15-18. However, I didn't really plan a narrative for this idea, therefore, it was a weaker idea than my biopic short film trailer which had a clear narrative. I also felt that I couldn't really come up with an original music video idea in the hip-hop/rap genre as I felt I would just be copying previous ideas that were original ideas. Furthermore, hip-hop videos are easier to film than biopics and I felt that I wanted to challenge myself rather than stick with a safe option that may not test my skills that much. 

Introduce Main Task

The brief that I chose for my final project from the OCR Specification is to create a trailer for a biopic short film, along with a promotional package consisting of two ancillary products. The two ancillary products will be a poster for the short film and a magazine cover featuring the film.

I decided to do a short film trailer because it would help me build on the skills I developed during the AS Coursework that I did last year when I created a short film with the help of a group. Having achieved a solid C grade in my coursework, I wanted to improve the knowledge and skills I learnt last year and develop new ideas and skills in a genre that I haven't previously done.

The genre of the film trailer will be a biopic following the story of a young footballer on his path to success all the way from playing youth team football to playing in the Champions League, Euros and the World Cup. This will be an interesting genre to do as there are a lot of key conventions that I can either follow or subvert.

The reason for choosing to do the film poster is due to the fact that I have worked on film posters earlier on in my education as this was part of my Year 7 Media Course at my previous school. Therefore, previous knowledge I had from that experience will help me produce a high quality poster to promote my short film trailer using similar or even more advanced software such as Adobe InDesign or Photoshop. The other reason being is that a lot of posters I've seen have attracted my attention and resulted in me watching the film it was promoting. Here is a poster promoting the film Goal, which is also a short biopic film following the story of a young footballer, that has helped me develop ideas for producing my poster. I also chose to do a magazine cover to promote the short film trailer because I've seen a lot of magazine covers that have promoted blockbuster films successfully. This is what I wish to do with my second ancillary product because I want to produce a high-quality and professional magazine cover that promotes my short film trailer effectively.

Main Task Planner

In order to know what I could do for each initial idea that I had, I had to plan each of my 3 ideas using the parameters of chosen genre, log-line, synopsis, representation and media language. The Main Task Planning Table has allowed me to organise my ideas and judge which one of my ideas is the strongest and best possible option for my final film.

Initial Ideas Video Pitch Evaluation

I felt that in my Initial Ideas Video Pitch, I gained some constructive feedback from a focus group on my initial ideas for my Final A2 Media Studies project and tips on how I could film my final project. The majority of the audience said that my music video ideas didn't have strong enough narratives for them to work out for my project. Therefore, they thought that my biopic idea about a footballer was definitely the best idea out of the 3 that I pitched.

One of the focus group proposed that I should do the biopic as a trailer rather than a short film. They felt that the trailer would be the most effective way of portraying the story and the main character that the story revolves around. A lot of the group recommended to do a lot of close up shots, first person shots and background breathing or heart beat noises while the footballer is taking a penalty. The group also recommended to do super impositions onto real-life football stadiums to make the biopic as believable and realistic as possible.

The focus group said that my first idea of a hip-hop/rap music video was too underdeveloped to be strong enough to be my final piece for my A2 project. They liked that my idea stuck to conventions of a rap video but they felt that the idea was too generic to be a developed idea. The main criticism was that it was underdeveloped and not good enough to be a final project.

They also said that my 2nd idea of a RnB music video was also underdeveloped and not good enough to be my final project. This is due to the fact that there isn't a clear narrative to my music video and this wouldn't help my music video be good enough on its own. Therefore, they chose my 3rd idea of a biopic short film trailer over my two music videos.

Finally, I learnt that there were advantages and disadvantages to every initial idea. However, the biopic emerged as the strongest idea and therefore, based on this feedback and constructive criticism, I have decided to do a biopic short film trailer for my final A2 Media Studies Project.