You have been approached by Film 4 to make a new British social realist film aimed at British 16-24 year olds. To give Film 4 an idea of how your film will develop, they have asked you to produce the first two minutes of the film, providing a clear sense of the graphical, editing and musical style your film will use. To protect film 4's reputation as a leader in British cinema the film must conform to the conventions of the Social Realist genre, and meet all the audience expectations for this type of film. Finally, to keep costs low all visual and audio material used in the film must be entirely original with an exception of stock sound affects.
For our opening sequence, we were approached by Film 4, for which we had been asked to create a 'British Social Realism (BSR) film. These are films made using lower budgets, and inexperienced actors (raw talent) in order to make a film which is not made to entertain, but inform audiences of issues that take place in society. We feel that we have met the brief well as we used a white teenage male character as the protagonist for our film, which targets a British audience, as asked ( skip to 0:22 secs). The title we chose for our film was 'Bridges' (skip to 1:06 secs) which connotes the relationship between the white protagonist and the Indian girl. However, the implicit message implies 'Bridges' represents the cultural clashes between both the main characters and due to this why they cannot be together. It can also show how the white character's struggle to face and fit into the Asian society. This idea would have then further developed, had we produced a full film. The rest of the film would show the white man undergoing many difficulties and facing racism from the Asian community, as well as the Indian girl's family along his journey to gain his love. Although it is fairly difficult to establish these BSR themes within the first two minutes of the film, we did not show verbal racism towards the white character as it was supposed to be very subtle in the beginning, showing a gradual build up. However, we show the Indian shop owner giving the white character a nasty glare (skip to 0:53 secs), making the audience aware that there is an issue, and shows he is unwanted, which is further explored when the Indian girl's brother throws the white character out of the shop (skip to 1:37 secs), which implies to the audience that he does not belong there.
