Practice In Action Module Report
Beginning this module, my group members and I discussed what our strengths and weaknesses were so that we could decide on what roles we would take in this project. My role was director due to the group’s confidence that I could be fair and organised. And I believed that from day one, we would all work with each other and not for each other. In regards to idea development, initially the majority of the group was keen to include an element of gore in the story; this was more or less the starting point after we drew our four pictures to create themes. Incorporating our final themes of isolation and oppression, we discussed making one idea with graphic representations of gore in the form of art and we chose to use isolation in the theme of mental health in a protagonist stuck in an abusive relationship.
When pitching our final two ideas, I felt that we were confident and unbiased in explaining our ideas. Idea one was chosen; the idea about a woman creating with her own blood in a world where creativity is illegal. What was challenging when we were making the screenplay was how we could imply the world’s lore of illegal creativity without plainly telling our audience through posters or news articles within the frames of the film. We struggled in deciding what the end painting would actually be and if it should be washed away at the end.
Resolving these problems, we created a sub plot within the film about the protagonist’s loss of a child she had taken away from her. This implied the oppression we wanted and it also gave us the final painting design which was a fetus.
On the first two days of production, we were organised in most respects; however, upon reviewing the raw film, it was clear that we’d made a mistake with the lighting. In trying to create a dark mood in the garage, we’d cut down masses amounts of light and there was little information being received by the camera as shown not only by the footage but by the scopes in Davinci Resolve. And when trying to raise the exposure, the amount of noise in the frame was too large to ignore.
The only way we could resolve this was to reshoot everything with a brighter setting and then darken the scenes in post. In doing it all again, the results were much more rewarding and successful when grading the raw film.
As far as production went, I feel that I’ve taken away a lot in regards to working with others and agreeing on a group idea. I found that being director involved a lot of listening but a lot of decision making. I had to make sure that everything that was being brought to me for review such as sounds, score and painting designs; everything was suitable enough for the story and conveys our message effectively.
I will also take away from this what it is to work with people under stress and keeping people motivated. When announcing to the group our reshoot plans, we were set back a little but I found that being keeping everyone motivated even under the stress of reshoot was effective in keeping quality in performance and efficiency on set.
In editing, myself and Ellie were responsible for the visual editing side of the film while Oscar and Fi were responsible for editing and creating the sound and score for the film. Personally I think that dividing the post work in this way proved to be effective as we each had a specific area to perfect.
Now that the final cut has been exported, I can say that I am pleased with what we’ve achieved in creating this short film. From a personal point of view, it’s not a genre I would be particularly interesting in watching. However, from a directorial point of view, I feel that we have utilised the visual components we selected and combined them with sound to create a film with a story that is visibly shown to transpire through the perspective of one character faced under oppression.
I particularly like the way sound was used to tell the sub plot within the story of the protagonist’s child that got taken away from her. This sequence of sounds explaining this context motivates her drive to finish her painting; using up her last ounces of strength to complete it and not run from the police to save herself.
Saying all of this, I feel that the film could have done with more scenes to distinguish when tension slows down and speeds up. Due to the five minute limit on the time, everything happens a little bit faster than I think it needs to be but never the less, the same tension and meaning is still put across in my opinion. I also think that we could have taken greater measures to acquire better costumes for the police as we were limited with the resources and budget.
Were we to shoot this film again, I would take more time to plan out the shots individually; focusing in more on the development of visual components and the golden ratio; so that we can save a lot of time on production and keep things running smoothly. I would also plan more days to do a proper recce and test shoots in order to avoid the lighting problem we faced. On that note, I would also hook up the camera to an external monitor to double check how the shot looks on a bigger screen. Furthermore, I would do more reviews of footage on set; checking the light scopes and making sure that we have the right settings, lighting and camera angles so that things can continue to run smooth. In summary, I feel we worked well as a group and shared our ideas equally and listened to each other respectively; this was a successful group project.
