Film Final Evaluation

Film Final Evaluation

For our film project we had to work in teams to create a short film with a duration of 1 minute. I had never done anything to do with film before so I couldn't really look forward to anything. I didn't know what to expect at all. The only restrictions that we had was the length of the film itself. It was meant to be a minute in length and at first all of us were a little cautious. A minute was a very short time, especially to portray a story of some sort. But it can be done, that was as much as we knew.

All of our research was based on short films that were a minute in length or close. It was mainly to get to grips with what we could achieve in such a short length of time. We watched films such as "The Black Hole" which told the story of a boring office worker who experienced a slippery slope of greed that eventually led to his downfall. The key to telling a story in a minute is to use scenes that are very short, they need to be very short and in order to get through your story you need to shoot loads of them. The scenes must be concise though, they must get to the point otherwise you are wasting a lot of screen time and not getting anything important shown.

Our group was very organised, we planned to meetup on a Sunday and thankfully everyone turned up and all on time. We were very efficient with our shooting, we were all aware of what scenes needed to be shot first so we could save time. My group went down to the river side and began our filming, everyone in the group had something to do, Me especially as I was one of the actors. We spent quite a bit of time making sure we had the framing right and that included a lot of re-filming various scenes. Sometimes we wouldn't have some of the props in the scene or one of the actors weren't in the frame as much as they should have been. It was the right thing to do in my opinion, my group showed that they wanted to get the film done as best as possible.

Everyone's film had to have a Moral Premise as the basis to their plot. That was what their story had to be based upon. Our's, however, didn't have a solid moral premise and therefore the tutor, Sebb, had a really big problem with it. Despite this we still continued to film. I think that the only thing we could have done to improve our film would be to come up with a solid moral premise to backup our ideas.

Working as a team was strangely more enjoyable than I had anticipated. I'm usually not a fan of working in groups, I can do it well if absolutely necessary but I prefer not to. This is generally down to clashing ideas and split opinions. However I kind of just let everyone have what they wanted to happen, happen. Our teamwork really shone whilst we were filming, we were all cold but we persevered and got all the shots we needed. Something we could have done better was probably generating ideas, there were about five of us and we seemed to struggle to come up with an idea for our film hence why we still don't have a solid Moral Premise. However, overall I felt that it was a quite enjoyable experience and we created a successful short film.