Short film evaluation
During my short film unit I worked with Emma and Darren for the third time. I had and have the upmost faith in both of them as I feel we’ve always produced a high standard of work. I feel by working together time after time has helped us as we’ve been able to highlight each others strengths and use them to our advantages. One of Emma’s strengths is her organisation skills and without them id be lost at points as that with ease is probably one of my worst weakness’s, Emma is also a particular good writer which helps me out a lot. Darren peaks when it’s the initial stages of the project like brainstorming ideas and developing storyboards, he’s incredibly creative when filming and always gives off a positive vibe, I find working with him effortless. I would say my strongest point of the whole process is more towards the later stages with the editing process by tweaking and fiddling with micro aspects of the film yet I do like to be involved with the creation of ideas. I could yet again see myself working with these two again.
Even though it sounds like we get on like a house on fire there are still a lot of petty disagreements within our group usually between Emma and me. I feel that all three of us are such good friends I cant be hard at times to keep that working mentality together all the time, I also know that my stubbiness didn’t help at times too. As I group I think we all took a chilled attitude towards our short film, nowhere near the intensity of how we’ve approached projects in the past. Looking back at the unit vie realized a lot of flaws that the group and I made. I can only go on to say I hope I can improve on them.
The most effective thing about our short film I would say would be the type of shot it consists of. We tried to have as many tracking shots as possible as I feel shots that are moving are the most visual interesting. I think we did a good job of staying away from conventional long, wide and close up shots by pushing it with some experimental things for us. We went to the extent of using wheelie chair for a dolly and standing on tables for over the shoulder shots. By going for a more outlandish approach towards our shots it helped us get the realistic, down to earth feel, which is a strong element of our narrative. Unfortunately some of hand held shots look a tad shakey and verge on schoolboy filmmaking. Our narrative has a strong hidden message and with some of our diverse shots are able to keep the audience interested for five minutes.
Coming of that I feel are location was strong and added to the aura of the short. One of our main focuses was to make the film as common as possible so people digest it easily and be able to relate to it; therefore we shot our film in south London’s local Tulse Hill. We filmed part of short film in a house in there area, which had a nice vibrant feel to it. I was able to convince a shop owner to allow us to film in his shop. The shop fitted our film perfectly as it was slightly run down but had a warm ambient feel to it. The shopkeeper was ridiculously helpful and at times made me wonder if he was considering a career change.
My new pet hate is continuity within anything! When filming our short film I thought everything was going fine, shot rolling after another and another but when it came to editing I saw that there was major problems fortunate I feel we may have wiggled out it slightly down to cheeky editing but its far from perfect on that front. One for example is Ojan standing up walking to his shelter area with a hat on and the next shot he’s sitting down without a hat and just makes our short look amateur. This was somewhat of an ongoing problem and had to use editing to hide some of our mistakes.
I feel we’ve added to our style with theses experimental shots. Our idea scrutinizes the value of money “the £5”, looking how people interest and value of the money changes from gender and classes. With this you follow a day in the life of a five-pound note as it goes through the hands of three characters and the different scenario it encounters. Through out the film we see most things through the eyes of the five-pound note. I think the idea is interesting and a lot could be done to it but I feel that our group didn’t execute it to our full potential. We somewhat lost the narrative that was depicted in the storyboard which if we follow would of made the short better in my opinion. We found it hard to be strict and follow the storyboard but were like a moth to a flame for spontaneous creativity, we just need to find the balance that allows us to produce good work.
We where unfortunate to not get a boom mic as they where all booked out this would of help immensely as some of a dialogue is a bit quite and could of done with a boom mic picking it up more. From this we had to add subtitles as you can always hear everything. Another problem we encountered was music, this caused constant bickering within the group as we all felt we had a song that would work with the piece. For example Emma was sold on something similar to the streets but I felt it was just a bit to predictable. Darren was able to find a piece of copyright free music but had to pay for it, the music is upbeat and urban but I wouldn’t say it’s a 100% match with our film but does a good job especially as we where getting nowhere in that department.
Our short film fits many of the conventions for a short film and I should know them seeing as it seems like it’s been forever that we've been studying short film. We had a small cast and worked on a budget, which was near to nothing. We used no effect during the postproduction stages. There is not an overload of dialogue. It has a firm underlying message and doesn’t fit hand in hand with any genre.
Our target audience is prodomatly 15 – 35 year olds. I think we made the short film fit this audience as the editing style is young, characters are all young a relevant, location was a sweet shop, the aspect of not having any money ‘the student life’, urban surrounding and a up beat piece of no diegetic music. I think we need to stop going towards that realistic urban side of films as were limiting over selves, as that’s what we’ve done for our last 3 projects now.
Concluding I’d say I'm relatively happy with the final edit our short film but isn’t my favourite bit of video. Yet I feel that the computers being robbed had pushed everyone of the short film wavelength and I know I struggled to slot back into that mind frame. If we had shot more footage maybe some back history stuff or even tried to involve a flashback we would of profited from it. When going onto my final video project I now have a lot of experience and wont make these mistakes, but I still feel short film is decent a deserve to be watched.
Kai McClean Doggett
13JPR
