Ideas Brainstorm

These are the initial ideas for themes to include within our film and ones that are commonly present in the gritty realism genre. These themes are mostly associated with real life situations, hence why gritty realism films have such high levels of verisimilitude and have high audience relate-ability. 

Development of Ideas for Our film: 

Our initial idea was to focus on the theme of gender and struggles with gender identity from middle aged people as normally these issues are tackled with young people as the protagonists so we wanted to take a different approach. We wanted to do this because we believed the issue does not singularly effect young people. Furthermore the amount of middle age audience could potentially be higher than young people, therefore more people would be able to relate to the film. 

1. Our first idea for this theme was to have the plot revolve around a middle aged woman within a role reversed nuclear family. She would be a career wise woman whilst her husband would be a stay at home dad. However her life would differ from normal as she faces her true gender identity: male. As the characters life progressed she, now transitioning to a he, would face relationship problems with both their husband and children. Their husband would also experience problems with sexual orientation and the children facing the problem of bullying because of their family situation, as well as the protagonist facing issues at work. We would include props such as binders and scenes of hair cutting to express the true desperation of the protagonist to be able to identify as who they believe they are, a male. However, these issues would of course be resolved by the end of the film, with the protagonist living with their kids and the husband and themselves would start their relationship anew. 

However, after coming up with this we quickly decided that we would prefer have our main theme be mental illness, specifically, Schizophrenia. We decided against our first theme because we felt we could do more with the theme of schizophrenia and make a more interesting opening sequence/film with this theme and thus do a better job of it. 

1. Our first idea for this theme was a middle aged man, around 40, living with his mother as a result of an illness he has which would be him struggling with a dual personality disorder. 

2. Our second idea for this was to have a film consisting of a female protagonist, again in her late 30's/early 40's and would see this character experience the issue of hearing voices that would influence her actions. This character would live with alone her children, as her husband has left her, with the film indicating towards the fact that it was because of her mental disorder.