Planning for production - The Examined synopsis

Process of writing the synopsis

Writing the synopsis at first proved to be quite tricky as we felt that although we had story of our film, emotional hook and theme sorted out we hadn't really discussed any of the other important elements like setting and stock characters/ protagonists in any real depth to be able to write out a full synopsis.

What we then decided to do was get a big sheet of paper and decide on different places to set our film, what sort of characters should be included and whether they should adhere or challenge stock characters normally seen in horror films, something we learnt in our research about stock characters of horror movies, what characteristics our protagonist should have. We also referred back to our plot synopsis work and how we were able to apply Burton's Genre Theory to it so we had a idea of how to do it to our own synopsis.

As a result the plot synopsis of 'The Examined' was much easier to write as we had done the appropriate amount of planning in order to make the synopsis. This has made me see the importance of planning and positive effects it could have on your work, as a result I am now going to ensure that before we make any decisions we do the appropriate amount of planning and research first. 

This is the final copy of the synopsis that I was given responsibility by my group to come up with. Once I had made it what we discussed was that a a next step I should look do the same thing I done when we was looking at plot synopsis' and apply Burton's Genre Theory to the synopsis to make sure I have successfully expressed the genre of the film through the synopsis.

So what I did was I looked back at one of the synopsis' that I analyzed and applied Burton's Genre Theory to and looked at how the genre of horror was expressed through that movies synopsis. What I realized from this was not only was the movies synopsis expressing the genre of the film, it was also revealing some of the plot of the movie without giving too much away.

Key: 

Setting

Protagonist

Stock Characters

Themes

Plots/ Stock Situations

Icons

What I then done was analyzed my own synopsis and apply Burton's Genre Theory to it to see if I had also successfully expressed the genre of the film by including all of the six elements that make a horror movie and also if I had revealed some of the plot to the audience without giving too much away. On completion of doing this I found out that from comparing to the other synopsis I analyzed I had successfully been able to express the genre of the film with I have shown by color coding where the different elements are and that I had also successfully revealed some of the plot without giving too much away which I think is mainly due to the fact that I had learnt a lot from all of the research tasks and from planning the synopsis and so was very prepared when writing it out.