Evaluation

For my final production film, I aimed to make a live-action film split into two genres. The first, in film noir, conveying a teenager’s boredom. She then falls asleep and has a dream of enjoying the London nightlife, and this leads to the second part of the film, fast-paced colour film of this teenager getting ready for her adventure. In my statement of intentions, I vaguely mentioned the mid section dream. However, I felt that my film’s story line was weak and needed something else. I also planned to use a German expressionist genre for the first half of the film, but I realised that this genre would relish under a horror or gothic film, and my film is not at all like this therefore I have gone for a similar genre of film noir, where I felt I could still use the genre to create a depressing atmosphere.

Through my film, I wanted to show an exaggeration of the stereotypical teenager living in London: Young and vibrant, and desperate to go out and have fun. I feel this image was created, but perhaps in an over the top manner.

Following this order of film, I therefore split my filming into 3 sections. The first: film noir. The second: her dream, and the third: fast-paced colour film. Before starting the filming, I made a photo storyboard illustrating each frame of the film, however this was one major problem I had with developing my film as I didn’t stick to my storyboard, so found myself changing and experimenting with things on the spot.

A second problem I had was with my shooting schedule. As the first part of the film is in a film noir style, I had to make sure that the natural lighting was accurate for this, therefore having to shoot just after sunset at around 6. This limited the flexibility of my filming, and caused problems as the main actor had to schedule around this time. Furthermore, as the days became shorter, this time was changing all the time and again caused further chaos.

A third problem I had was producing a 5-minute film, a time that seems shorter than it actually is. I discovered that producing a film of this length is very challenging. I therefore changed my plot slightly, adding in the dream sequence in the middle, which originally wasn’t there.

I had to use final cut throughout the editing process and I feel that I have developed my skills in this. In my film, I experimented with fading sound out; I also used slow motion and speed up often. I just feel generally more confident when using this software.

I also feel I have developed my skills using a camera. As I needed the first half of the film to be very still, I used a tripod, a piece of equipment I had never used before, so I felt very satisfied that I could experiment with this equipment, changing the angle and panning of the camera. In contrast with the first half of my film, I wanted the second half to be fast-paced, and thought using a freehand camera would help this. Therefore throughout my film I have developed my skills using a camera by freehand, and with a tripod.