DP1 Film Project – ‘Shoe Done It?’

Today I finished my short film called ‘Shoe Done It?’ this is for my Design Practice 1 film project.

The brief was to create a 3 minute film with the key storyline being a woman eats a pasty and falls asleep on a park bench; when she wakes up, she realises one shoe is stolen and through police interviews of her and witnesses the thief is found. The film also needed to contain flashback scenes and an interview within the Arboretum Park.

The entire process took three weeks to complete. In the first week our class was split into groups of 4 or 5 students; my production group consisted of me, James Bedford, Nick Horton, Marcus Howard and Georgia Hirth.

Week one was spent familiarising ourselves with the camera equipment and choosing roles for each individual in the group. Initially we chose the genre of mockumentary; in the style of programs such as The Office.

In week two we chose the strongest story from the individual storyboards and developed this into a script, we went with Nick’s script as this seemed to contain the most humour which was essential for our film. Nick also had two friends who had done acting before and were willing to be in our film.

In week three we did the filming as a group and then edited individually. All filming was done during a three hour session on Wednesday 9th November. The locations we used were the Arboretum Park and a room within Waverley building. All footage was shot on manual camera settings with white balance calibrated for each different location. I spent around 8 hours editing on Thursday and Friday.

Luckily we filmed on a bright and dry day so the outdoor footage looked well lit and colours were vibrant. The indoor footage was a little darker and greyer; I overcame this problem by adjusting the brightness/contrast and colour balance within Adobe Premiere. Specifically, I increased the brightness and contrast by subtle amounts to brighten the image; I then increased the amount of red and green in the indoor shots to give them a warmer look. In future I would like to use lights for indoor shooting as this allows for greater control and continuity in lighting between shots.

One difficulty I had was cutting between shots which had a similar composition e.g. medium shot of interviewee to another identical shot of the same person. If I had done a straight cut between these shots you would have noticed an obvious jump; my solution was to zoom into one of the shots or apply a page peel transition. I did the best I could with the footage I had but if we had the opportunity to shoot again I would have been more careful with the composition of shots with editing in mind.

During the editing I spent a lot of time mixing the audio. In some cases I had to dip the volume of individual phrases in the actor’s speech to give a balanced overall sound. It would have been useful if I could apply an audio compressor/limiter to the master audio mix as this would smooth out the peaks.

I recorded the music at home using an Ibanez guitar into a Line 6 POD X3 amp simulator; this was then recorded into Sound Forge and mixed with drums and bass in Reason 4.

This was a very enjoyable project and I am pleased with what I have achieved with my group. I look forward to working on another film project in the next term.