STORYTELLING: Short Film - SOFT

In todays lesson we watched a short film written by Simon Ellis, called SOFT. It was about a man who got attacked by a group of thugs and then at home realises his son was attacked by them too. The thugs then followed him home and started graffitiing his car and harassing them. We found that the man was afraid of the group and couldn't bring himself to confront them, leading his son to go out and scare the group away. 

After watching the film, we split it into sections.

Genre - Drama/suspense/short film

Setting - Modern/urban

Main characters - Father/son

Secondary characters - Thugs

Conflict - Fear/pride/power/emotional conflict

Change - Change in morals/moral compass/roles reversed

Theme - Coming of age/father and son relationship/karma/bullies/masculinity - what it takes to be a man

Tone - Gritty/real

Following this, we had to create our own pitch for the film. We were given the advice to think of it as an 'Elevator Pitch', this means that we should be able to pitch the idea to someone we've just met, maybe a producer of a film, in the amount of time it takes to use an elevator. The words we split the film up in to earlier gave us an idea of what words to use for it. My pitch was:

'Father and son encounter role reversal when a group of thugs attack. While father attempts to overcome emotional conflict, son bravely steps in.' (22 words)

However, when i read this out to Simon and the rest of the group, he reminded me that I revealed the ending. Although he said this was not a bad thing, I wasn't sure if I wanted to tell the ending so i amended it:

'Father and son encounter role reversal when a group of thugs attack. Will father's lack of strength come between him and his son back home?' (25 words)

This pitch sounds better to me as it doesn't reveal the ending and asks a question for the reader to think about and answer if they want. Again, this exercise was very useful and gave us another chance to build a pitch for practice for our own. 











In the second part of the session we watched another short film by Simon Ellis again called Stew & Punch. This one was about a housewarming party and one of the hosts got a bit too drunk after losing an arm wrestle with his girlfriend/wife, and then became violent towards a neighbour asking for the noise to be turned down. I preferred SOFT out of both films as I found it more interesting and I wanted to see how it ended, whereas, I found Stew & Punch more predictable as someone is bound to get too drunk at a party with it never ending well and I was not fussed about seeing it to the end.