Evaluation

After hours and hours of looking at our short film on the screen, I had been starting to worry that it wasn’t looking as good as I wanted it too. After seeing it during our screening today on the big screen, I was really pleased with the outcome. Although we kept our storyline very simple, we spent hours and hours of our own time, making sure everything was cut at just the right time, making sure the audio was all on the same level and just cleaning up the final piece in general. Overall I would say our film met our original criteria we set out at the beginning of the year. Before I had pitched the idea of doing something similar to the 3 minute wonders, I originally had a vision that our short film would include students from the fashion department as I thought it would be something very contemporary and up to date. I would say that the course our actors study is the only major change that happened over the course of the 2 months we had to film. I personally think that this worked out for the better as the students we chose all studied on the same campus as us and TV class, which made getting in contact with them all very easy. After discussing what kind of students we wanted to use in our project, ease of access played a big role in which we were going to choose. Although I personally knew fashion students around my halls of residence, it proved a lot harder than expected to try and find a time where we would both be free to shoot the interviews. Fashion has a very heavy work load to it to which we almost found it unfair to add any more work to their daily lives. As far as roles went, none of us really ended up with our designated roles by the end of it. To begin with we only had 2 members of the group which we had given designated roles to each other, when we was introduced with a third member, we had to split the roles up even more which made things a little harder to manage. We had a few hiccups along the way with one member of our group letting us down a few times by not turning up on more than one occasion but thankfully when we was altogether, everything seemed to get done. As a whole, I would say our short movie was successful. A few things I would have changed would have been to have a more detailed story bored as during the editing process, I found we lacked shots that would have finished each of the student’s stories off nicely. Another thing I would take into consideration next time would be that at the end of the day our film is what matters and we should not be too worried about taking up people’s time. I felt very conscious whenever I needed to film someone and whether they felt like we were taking up too much of their time; hence why we went for a simple story line so that we could make the most out of it during the editing process. Despite the issues we faced, our group put together a piece that exceed original expectations.

Nearly There...

This week we have all been in and out of university, editing and filming and touching up anything else we need to. So far we have cut down all of the interviews to the answers we wanted to keep, and cut them into separate interludes so that we can just slot them in once we add the more recent footage from today. The only footage we need to add in is of Angelia working which Kimberley filmed. Harriet and I have dedicated all of Tuesday to finish off the last bit of editing and sorting the audio as well as finding a suitable piece of background music. I am really pleased with how the short film is coming together. It has worked out that all of us haven’t taken on our original designated roles and have more or less taken on each role as a group but it seems to have worked really well. Kimberley took care of the filming of Angelia, Harriet took care of the filming for Tobi, and I took care of filming Charlotte. Each of us has ended up creating our own mini projects but making sure we stick to the same editing scheme and using the exact same titles throughout so it looks like one final piece. We have also edited 1 interviewees interview footage each which has saved us a lot of time when we have been working on more than one computer and transporting the files across.

Filming!!!

Today we have the whole group together, the green room is rented out, we have a camera and an SD card and we are ready to film! Before we got started we decided who was going to go down first. Tobi was the first to be interviewed and she set it off really well and gave the others a good idea of what their interview would look like too. Second was Charlotte, third was Angelia, and before we knew it, we had finished filming the interviews. We also found we had more footage than we intended, which is better than not having enough and having to go back and film more again. To make sure we didn’t lose anything we backed it up on Kimberley’s memory stick as soon as we got back from filming. That took a lot longer than expected but at last we have some footage that is ready to edit. We have 2 weeks until the final screening, so Harriet is dedicating Monday to film Tobi in the dance studios rehearsing and Thursday I will be videoing Charlotte whilst she is getting on with some work. All in all we’ve had a very productive day and I am really pleased with how the footage looks. We used 2 cameras to film, one face on and one from the side so that we can interchange shots throughout the interviews. We will have to edit as we go along which we will take it in turns to do.

A Small Delay

So today, Harriet and I come in to class expecting Kimberley to turn up too so that we can get on with filming (earlier on this week, we had arranged to meet up and get started on filming as we all know editing takes a lot longer than expected) when Harriet gets a text to say that Kimberley isn’t coming in today as she doesn’t feel too good. Unfortunately these things happen but foolishly we left a lot of responsibility on Kimberley. Kimberley was the one who said she would bring in a form of memory storage big enough to hold footage onto as Harriet and I left all of our things like that at home in Norfolk, so today no filming was undertaken which was a bit of a waste of a day. To make the most out of the time we had spare, Harriet and I went over the questions with our interviewees so they knew what to expect on the day. Next week we will definitely be filming whether Kimberley is here or not as I am going home this weekend therefor I can collect my hard drive to store footage onto. Although this a minor setback, it has also taught us to always have a back up plan.