Statement of intent:
The audience we were aiming for were students who study film or media, or those who are interested in the process of making a short film. Student films are generally made for an audience of like-minded individuals, short films for people who make short films. The logline we created was “a student film about a student film”.
The genres available to pick were either a mockumentary or a coming-of-age tale; as a group we decided to make a mockumentary based around the American TV show ‘The Office’. There are certain conventions that come hand in hand with both genres. For example, with a mockumentary (more specifically ‘The Office’) there is a lot of handheld camera work and cut-away to interviews with the characters. We intended to, at the very least, have the cut-away interviews.
Following the recognised theme of ‘The Office’ we decided to set our film in a meeting room that we had easy access to. Regarding sound design, we used a microphone attached to the camera as the room was fairly small and could pick up dialogue from the opposite side of the room quite easily – we did still brief those acting to speak clearly and loud enough for the mic to pick it up from a distance.
We understood that one of the hardest aspects of a film challenge is getting actors, the other aspect being location, but this didn’t prove to be much of a problem for our group. To solve the issue of not having any actors, each member of the crew appeared on screen.
Report:
Initially this film was intended to only meet the criteria set (theme/line/prop); however, upon reflection I now understand that I needed to consider more deeply the platform for screening and exactly who would be watching the film – rather than uploading the film to Vimeo without any further thought. There was no consideration for the bigger picture.
The most significant choices we made whilst producing the 48 Hour Film Challenge were deciding on a location and the sacrifices we had to make regarding that aspect, trying to decide whether to bring in actors or use ourselves and how much time we would dedicate to each part of pre/post-production.
Generally, with film challenges the biggest hurdles to get over are finding locations to shoot in and actors to work/learn a script in such short notice. We understood this and decided that overcoming these big issues would be our focus before filming. As a group of students, we knew that we have access to many rooms on campus therefore I decided (as the writer and director) to base the film around one of these locations; this also got rid of the concern that we would aim too high with the story and consequentially fail by not meeting the brief. That is when we decided to follow the style of ‘The Office’, as that TV show fit in best with the theme from the set brief. Writing the story was easy as I followed the standard advice of “write what you know” and what I knew was that we had to produce a film in a short amount of time. At this point, we were following our agreed statement of intent with no big issues.
After assigning roles and deciding what work people would take on for the project, some people in the group went away to do a recce of one of the locations we had in mind before deciding. We found that the room that we wanted to use had a constant hum in the background due to one of the machines. After some thought we decided, since this room was bigger than others and could comfortably fit the whole crew and equipment, that we would sacrifice entirely clean audio for the bigger space. To solve this issue in the given time we could have compromised on space or if we had more time, then we could have looked at more possible locations.
On the day of filming we all arrived at the agreed location and when we got there and set up we realised that no one had put any thought into how we wanted the finished film to look – we had a general idea but no means of reaching that goal. Regarding the cinematography, the only thing any of us considered was that we needed lights. We assumed that the overhead lights in the room and the Dedo lighting kit would be enough to achieve the look we were trying to replicate – the bright lighting of ‘The Office’. Upon reflection, greater consideration should have been put towards making someone the director of photography or at least in charge of lighting specifically. The ‘camera department’ was very small as we only had two people who didn’t have a very clear idea of what their respective roles consisted of (camera operator and gaffer/lighting). As the writer and director I was putting my attention on directing the actors rather than organising the equipment, I trusted the rest of the crew to do their jobs. A solution to this issue would have been having more meetings to discuss the fine details of each role to create a clear idea of what each person was to do.
During the initial meeting we had to divide our time carefully between pre-production and post, looking back at the content we produced I believe we made a good decision of splitting the time equally. It’s commonplace that pre-production takes a larger proportion of time however we felt it was necessary to have just as much time on post-production because of the close deadline. I feel this worked in our favour as we had more time to spend on good editing although some of the excess time we had could have been used to get extra shots as we only filmed exactly what we needed.
If I was given the opportunity to do this again I would certainly spend some more time planning and factoring in extra time to get more variation with the camera. I would consider being more ambitious regarding the story idea and the script as our only aspiration this time around was to meet the brief rather than making something we enjoy or were proud of.