Final major project evaluation
The final major project had a brief that said it was to promote and display the skills and techniques I
have learnt over the past year; create a final project that demonstrates these. The
theme is ‘the Mind’ and the film will be projected onto a thatre screen at a St Albans Film Festival
event on the 14th of June. After the event, it will be put online to be shown on a website. The target
audience is likely to be people between the Ages of 16 and 30 but could involve a secondary
audience of younger children. The films must be between 3 and 7 minutes in length and must
adhere with the festival rules below. You final submission should be submitted in 1080p H.264 mp4
format to one of the tutors. The brief had five different tasks with five different deadlines.
Once we had booked everything out we split up the pre-production work and made sure that
everyone had an equal amount of work and no one was doing more than someone else or vice
versa. We all made sure to set a deadline for when the pre-production tasks had to be complete by. I
had already made a draft script which only needed to be cleaned up and finalised so it wasn’t that
stressful. Everything from the pre-production went well.
The production side of our fmp was very long. During the filming process, we would mask the floor with tapes. This would be where the position of all the equipment would be placed so we could get the exact same frame the next day. However, while filming we were not able to keep the tape masked to the floor because the room had to be used for another day. This was inconvenient because it meant that we had to recalibrate the setup again so we could film. This was annoying however, we were able to use pen to mark the floor, which we did use, this made everything so much easier so we could setup in minutes.
One person was late on a consecutive amount of days. This was a draw back because we had to wait for this individual to attend because he had the role of audio management. His role was extremely important because we had no one else to hold the boom pole and to position the microphone.
While filming the full shot of our subject (patient) the camera was too close to the subject, this meant that the top of his head would be cut from the frame, this was huge! We had no way of re-filming or being able to attract the top of his head. Additionally, one actor we had in our film was not able to attend because she had to go to her own lesson.
After everything was sorted out my group and me, were the first group to go down to the equipment room and book out all the equipment that we needed and the media studio. I wanted to make sure that we could start the filming process as soon as possible because I wanted to leave enough time for post-production as I knew that would take up a lot of our time.
Finally, after all the filming was complete it was time to edit. By the time, we had finished filming we
had two weeks before the deadline. I thought that this would have been more than enough time but
we also needed to finish some postproduction coursework,
Unfortunately, during the editing I had realised that we had forgot to film some of the clips in the rush to finish filming so other people could use the equipment. That was one of our biggest mistakes and priorities as a group, Having those clips could have helped the short film a lot. It was too late to go back and film them because the equipment was booked out right up until our deadline, as well as the media studio which was very unfortunate.
I have learnt that even though you think you have checked everything, you should check again to
avoid situations that we had. Even though we didn’t have all the clips we wanted. I had to make
what we had work for my edit and make good out of a bad situation. As I was editing it became clear
to me that the clips that we didn’t film were the ones that would make the short film look more
professional. However, I made sure that I did not leave it blank and I used some of the other clips
and masked them together.
With what the short film has become. For me it was all about taking and not following what everyone else was doing. I wanted to push myself and my abilities and I feel as though I done that. Along the way, I have learnt a lot more than I would’ve if I hadn’t gone through with my idea and not made the mistakes I made.
The film did manage to complete the brief fully, all the shots and structure folded out well and created a great video. To improve next time we must make sure that we collate and create a better storyboard so that wqe can have each and everyshot plannedfor when we film, instead of improvising shot types.