Reflective Audit:
Statement of intent:
We intended to create something aimed at an adult audience, as it seemed to be the easiest target range to go for encompassing students all the way to pensioners, specifically anyone who enjoys light hearted easy watching.
This was achieved through the themes we used and the cutting of the final piece to make it seem light hearted about a serious topic.
Speaking of the themes we tried to get cross, we aimed to create something that tackled depression and the longing for something more than life. Death. This was also achieved within the story showing a man depressed so much he decides to kill himself, however he wants it so bad he persists every time he fails.
Our expectations for the actual story were extremely low. We aimed to create something, to have a finished project. However, this was our only expectation, to have created something, this is also relevant to sound, editing and production design. In the simplest of senses, we did in fact succeed as we did create something, it was edited, it did have sound, and as for production design, we wanted a set that looked like a student house, so we used a student house. In all aspects we did succeed our expectations, by setting them so low in the first place. Although the production quality is incredibly low we did theoretically succeed.
The cinematography side of it was aimed to be shaky hand-held shot, like that of documentaries that are run and gun, following the characters around, interviewing them at key points. This is exactly how we shot it, and in terms of the look we were going for, we believe it came out quite like what we wanted.
Report:
The most significant choices made whilst creating the 48-hour film were first and foremost the locations, and the way we would use the locations to best tell the story. Other significant choices, was the way of shooting and how to make it seem more like a mocumentary. Whilst making these decisions we identified a few major issues, the first being, that we had a very short period of time to decide on locations, the impact of this was that we only ended up using 2 locations for the full thing. This still managed to work to a certain degree as a lot of the shots, take place at different parts of the first location, Sam’s house. This made it seem like we had shot in a variety of locations.
In terms of the story itself, we decided to try and create a basic story before we were given the full brief as to what the genres were going to be, this allowed us to adapt the story to whatever genre we were given easily and meant we could start planning the rest of the project. I would consider this a successful aspect of the artefact as it increased the work flow substantially and meant we could spend more time working on everything else during the 48 hours rather than developing a story.
Once we had worked out the story we could then work out how we wanted to tell the story, what form it should take. Initially, we were going to attempt to make it a horror and show the main characters slow delve into madness after the pursuit of death. Once we got the brief and the genre of Mocumentary however we decided to take this in a different direction, luckily our story allowed for that. This didn’t hold to much of an issue against us, as we had planned in the pre-production stage to create a story that was flexible with genre.
An issue that did arise was the casting, we had planned to use 3 actors for the production, but we didn’t take the necessary steps towards contacting actors. The impact of this meant that on the day of actually shooting we had no actors which almost ended the production. The solution to this problem was that when it came to film we had to then use one of the crew members, John, to play the main character. A friend of another crew member to play the girlfriend, and a house mate of another crew member to play death. This didn’t give us the performances that we were looking for and it was all down to planning, we didn’t plan properly, and we were unprepared for the days shoot.
The planning stage of the process is the most crucial aspect of any film and if this stage is compromised then the entire film can fall apart. Sadly, this seems to be what happened with our project. By putting the actual filming before the story boarding and scriptwriting, leaving a lot of aspects to chance and ‘winging it’ meant we were entirely unprepared and lead to a lot of issues on the day especially with storytelling. We solved this on the day by thinking logically, “what would he do next?” etc. however this did mean that the story was lacking in structure and at this stage we just had to go with it and hope that we could “fix it in post” a term I hate and disagree with but was a last resort.
In terms of what was successful about the project, it did meet a lot of the expectations within the statement of intent. This is due to the fact that we didn’t have very high expectations of the actual finished project, by setting our expectations low, we could only excel. However, we still managed to disappoint ourselves with technical issues that could have been easily avoided, such as sound issues, and camera exposure issues, which again could have been easily solved.
The project did teach us a lot about how we need to spend more time properly planning out every single aspect of the film in excessive detail, because if we don’t we will end up missing essential and easy to solve things. Although we did meet most of our expectations, we still disappointed ourselves by creating something of such low value. We have learned from these mistakes and hopefully will remember to apply the solutions to future projects.