Teenage Behaviour

In most films teenagers are shown in either a very negative way or a very positive one. Whether that is through antisocial behaviour or achieving excellent things. Teenage behaviour can be broken down into many different sections.It is through the section you chose to focus on that depends on how your film will portray them.

Drugs

Drugs and smoking are stereotypically some of the thing teenagers are associated with when showing them in a negative light. It shows the teenagers as irresponsible and immature. It also forces the audience to think less of the characters and start to dislike them.

An idea incorporating teenage drug abuse in our film idea for our trailer maybe following one or more teenagers and seeing how drugs effect their lives at different stages. We could also show the differences and similarities in their home lives giving the audience the background to understand the characters and become more emotionally involved with them. By using this idea we would have a wide spread choice of things to film to put into our trailer to make it interesting and exciting.

Partying and Alcohol

Partying is another main aspect of the stereotypical teenagers life. Most movies show these teenage parties as rebellious and ridiculous. For example – the film Project X.

As you can see from this picture the boy in the front is smashing something with a baseball bat with a lot of other teenagers watching from behind. It is this reckless behaviour at parties that give teenagers behind.

As you can see from this second party a lot of people are used to create the party and although project X is an extreme party and has thousands of people in the cast we would still need at least 30-40 people to make it look realistic. This would probably be a problem when it came to filming due to the fact everyone would need to be at every filming day which could become complicated. As I learnt from out last piece of coursework getting actors at the same time is complicated due to their own commitments.

Alcohol

Alcohol is used a lot when showing parties and teenagers. It is the thing that is used as the reason that they become reckless and ignorant. For example: in this picture from the TV series Skins the girl is half naked due to the amount of alcohol consumed.

As a group i dont think it would be apropriate to have people half naked in our trailer so  maybe this kind of approach to showing alcohol would not be the right one. Instead we could show the drinking of the alcohol without showing the effects after. For example this picture shows a group of girls taking shots.

I feel that this would be more appropriate as it would be easier to film and doesn't contain nudity. This shot is also good as you can see each person consuming the alcohol meaning the viewer can see just how much the character is drinking emphasising the importance it has othe the teenagers night.

In movies everything is exaggerated and so it may be hard for us as group to recreate a large party and be able to film the things we need with the correct lighting and atmosphere. It is due to these complications I think a party theme is not the best route to go down. Although if we were to decide a party would be a good idea we could show the before and after of the party from a group of girls point of view and group of boys point of view. This ‘cutting out the partying’ is also used in the film the hangover. When they cut out most of the partying in the night and just cut straight to the morning after.

Inspiration Idea

If we were to chose teenagers as our foundation for our film idea we could not go down the partying/drug route and instead go down a sort of urban murder mystery route instead. We could take a story from the news. For example: the murder of Yemurai Kanyangarara. If we took the teenage gang related murder from this story we could follow his life before the attack and leave the killer as a mystery until the very end. This would make a very good trailer as it we would be able to create suspense and leave the watcher wanting more. Using this as our story would mean although we would need quite a few characters they would not all need to be filmed together so the problem about other commitments i mentioned earlier would not stop the filming because the filming could be flexible with each actors timetable and not be affected by the other actors agendas.