Short Film Evaluation
Pre-production
The pre production phase of my short was very quick in terms of moving forward. The idea I was fixated on was definitely something I wanted to make, the idea of nature taking back the planet in a believable way. I started the project a much different way than a usual production. In started with storyboards and built on from them as I already had an idea where I wanted to film to go. The script development was the biggest choice to make. I have two characters in mind but only one of them speaks. Early on I choose to make the script a narration over the moving image, I feel this made the film more personal to the character who was speaking. The location I picked fitted perfectly, I wanted to create this isolation and loneliness in a destroyed world but still beautiful with nature. What made it even more convenient is that the woodland area is only a 20 minute walk from the house where I live and having a beautiful location like that so accessible really boosted the visuals and the time I would have filming. The costume and props were easy to acquire as I had almost everything I had envisioned the only problem was a fake gun which came out of the budget and had to be recoloured from blue to black using a marker pen and spray paint to make it look authentic and relate that believability when it was put on screen. The Reece was very important as it would help me choice potentional locations and set pieces. This helped me improve bits of the story boards and included adding some more shots, there was a shot I really wanted to get but at the time of pre-production i couldn't aquire and that was a shot of a giant fallen tree over a river/stream. A shot like this would have been very dangerous aswell. Navigation round the woods was especially good on my behalf as I knew where landmarks are to travel to a certain location that I'd picked to film in. I decided that I also wanted to act in my film, for the simple fact of all the other students were using them for there other projects so there schedules were quite full and didnt fit the schedule of filming, also I thought it would be a challenge to act, direct and shoot the film. The only problem I had during pre-production was getting stock footage of a riot into my film, when I looked on websites the cost was between $80 - $100 so I couldn't use riot footage as it was overbudget and when I got down to the editing the link between the dialogue and the visuals didnt make much sense this meant that anykind of riot footage was cut from the film.
Production
With all the script finished and storyboards and shot list done the process moved into the production phase where myself and two other crew members begin filming in the woods. Navigating the location was easy thanks to the recce and the fact I know the area as well this made filming much faster. I planned to get all the footage in a days shoot which we did me and the crew efficiently set up shots as I directed the other actor as well as working with the camera man to set the shots up how I envisioned them during pre-prodcution. This was challenging in the beginning trying to get the balance between directing and acting trying to balancing them during filming was a intresting experience and payed off very well. A problem with the weather was the only variable I couldn't control, I encountered relentless wind ruining the sound. This opened an oppourtunity to gather foley sound to replace the distorted and unusable audio. To record the sounds I needed and to match the location and build the atomopshere of the scene, I went back to the location where I filmed at a later date when the wind was calmer. I recorded a number of sounds such as water, birds, gentle winds recording them with the shotgun microphone it gave me an acute angle to record specific sounds this made the sound effects sound really good going into the diting process. The BB gun looked good in shots thanks to the recolouring. filming took rougly 7 hours with 7 minutes of footgate recorded. Filming was a success as it fitted the schedule and
Post-Production
After filming I began to sort and log the footage into a decision list for the shots that were good and the ones that weren't. I Targeted the to be just over 5 and under 6 minutes long so cutting the shots down was very important as the rough cut of the film was 8 minutes long. Looking back at the shots I noticed that shots of the actors face were dark and badly voiced by the actor which had to be cut from the film. Parts of the script were cut including the riot scene which was due to how expensive the footage cost and also when I added some ripped footage from You Tube it didn't feel right to show what I was saying in that part of the script so I just kept the narration part. The biggest problem with the film was the format the sound was recorded in. The narration was recorded on a Edirol Recorder which was set to Stereo sound when I was recording my voice on a unidirectional microphone. This error meant that the narration only came through the left sound channel on headphones. If I had check the Edirol I would have been able to record in mono and just copy the left channel into the right side and the narration would be coming out of both headphones.
Other than the narration and the riot footage everything in the film went according to plan with it been finished and uploaded to You Tube.
