This film was created over a five week period, starting in the second week in January and ending in the second week in February. Here is a summary of the filming schedule:
Week 1
Our lecturer Phil Nodding split the class into groups, each group with seven to eight people. Phil also provided each group with a script he had written; he gave us the task of interpreting the script and developing it into a short film. During the first seminar we watched examples of short films and TV programmes to give us an idea of camera angles and storytelling techniques.
Week 2
We assigned a role to each member of the group and began to research the roles individually. As I have experience in music production and sound engineering I volunteered to do the sound recording. The other group member’s roles can be seen in the final credits of the film. We began to meet as a group outside of class to plan our pre-production; this included creating a storyboard and editing the script. We also started to think about costumes and actors.
Week 3
We had planned to start shooting our film on this week but we had difficulty finding actors; instead we used this time to test the camera, sound and lighting equipment. We inspected the location and tested the equipment while we were there; this helped us to plan the camera and lighting positions in advance of the shoot.
Week 4
By this time we had managed to complete the pre-production and found actors. The shoot began on Monday 30th January and ended on Wednesday 1st February. On all three days we tried to shoot within the early afternoon period (around 12pm to 4pm) so the lighting would be fairly consistent throughout. We had our storyboard and script with us during the shoot but we were still flexible with our choice of shots. After the previous film project we all knew that we would need a multitude of shots in order to make a good edit; therefore, we shot most scenes from more than one angle to allow for variations in individual edits.
Week 5
I began my individual edit on the Thursday of week 4 and finished on the Saturday night before week 5. I spent around 10 hours in total editing. I also spent around 6 hours composing, recording and mixing my own original music for the film on Saturday afternoon. The music was mixed in reason 4 and editing done in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5. While editing I used a variety of techniques to make my video and audio smoother. For the audio I used a compressor/limiter on all the dialogue; this increased the level of the quiet parts and decreased the level of the loud parts to give a balanced level on the dialogue track. The sound effects, atmosphere and music were all on separate audio tracks which did not require any compression. I also used cross fades between sound clips to eliminate clicks and pops in the audio. For the video I used colour correction and adjusted the brightness/contrast on some of the shots to give continuity in the lighting. I only used subtle amounts of colour correction as I didn’t want the video to look unnatural; as a result some of the shots are a bit darker and bluer than others. Overall I am happy with the way the film sounds and looks.
I chose to upload my completed film to YouTube instead of Vimeo; I did this as Vimeo has an upload limit of 500MB and I did not wish to compromise the quality of my 1.1GB video.
This has been a very challenging and time consuming project but very enjoyable. I wish to thank all the people I worked with to make this film; everyone worked hard and brought their own ideas and enthusiasm to make this project a success.
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