Lessons Learnt from last year - Jamie

Some of the key lessons I learnt from last year was to keep on top of work and that I need to make sure I am very organised, especially with blog work. One of the areas in which our group fell down last year was leaving everything just a bit too late, this meant we had to rush the process of making our final product. This year I want to focus on getting the best out of our product so giving myself enough time to get the highest quality out of my work will be crucial. 

  The techniques I need to take on from last year include continuity editing, because this is important in making any film seem realistic to the viewer. Using Foley sounds will also be a key factor in keeping the realism in the film, as sound is a very useful tool when making sure the film flows. 

 Mise en scene is something that needs to be heavily looked into, when making our thriller last year we had to make sure we had items and props in the scene that fitted with the thriller genre, for example a knife is often linked with the typical conventions of a thriller film. I think we could have spent more time thinking about the setting of our film, I think it was good at setting the scene as a thriller, however we were very limited as the room we were filming in was small, so finding interesting shots and angles was hard.

  This year I want to try and use lighting alot more because good use of lighting can really help to get across a certain mood or atmosphere, last year I felt our clip lacked the use of lighting and I believe a better quality final product can be produced using this powerful tool. I would like to try and experiment more with filters this year and the different effects we can achieve with them, because we watched a short film in class called 'The Black Hole' and it made very good use of using a filter to make a boring office block even more dull and lifeless.This helped to make the audience understand just how bored and fed-up the character was feeling.

Here is an example of how dull lighting and a filter have been used aswell as the facial expression on the mans face can portray boredom and lack of motivation.


I think its a very good way of creating a certain mood.
 


  I want to make better use of depth of field, because In the film 'Signs' it is used to show confusion and lack of interest, you can see here that the people behind the main character are out of focus, this gives the affect that the character does not want to be there, and his mind is on other things. This could be used to break up the film with different varieties of shots, because I felt out piece last year could have had some more variation. However here is an example of where we did use this technique.

Screen shot to come..

 Teamwork is paramount, good communication is needed and last year I felt that as a group we could have made sure we delegated jobs in order to make sure things got done alot more smoothly. More often than not we were unclear on who was getting what done, this made it very hard to get parts of the blog done on time. We nearly ran out of time when editing, this was due to being rushed and no knowing who was available at certain periods in the day, this is something I want to make sure is sorted.

  Our storyboard is something that could be improved, I think more time is needed on the storyboard as it is such a good base to work from when filming. More detail will be needed in the storyboard as last year we seemed to miss important details which slowed down the production process. The animatic we created was quite basic, we have been advised to use a post-it note system for this year, meaning we can chop out and add in new scenes and shots whenever and where ever we want, without having to redraw the whole storyboard or re-film the whole animatic. Tying in with this is also the use of clapper boards, we started out using them but as we ran out of time we ended up just filming shots here and there, when it came to editing it got a bit confusing. So this time I want to make sure we make good use of them as editing becomes a much simpler task. 

  Another area that I would have changed was the choice of actors in our film, even though this doesn't have an effect on the quality of the camera work or editing, I felt that if we had some actors who were more confident in there ability (not myself) it would have helped with the narrative of the clip.  Obviously when making a film you have to get across the emotions and feelings of the characters, camera work, mise en scene and sound could all be perfect but having actors who can use facial expressions can make or break the scene.