Evaluation

The task I set myself was to make a thriller, neo noir inspired short movie based around a murder, investigating the murder and the problems that result from this.
My film was inspired by the Manhunt video game and the Saw films, using the Manhunt style and the Saw lighting I had hoped to create a dark crime thriller.
Technically my film did work, everything I had planned to do shot wise etc worked fine, although I wasn’t happy with the cameras ability to make a bold contrast between light and dark, which was going to be a key feature in my film, with the Mac editing software I could get around this obstacle, this would involve adjusting the shots gamma and contrast to get a better colour and contrast between light and dark. I had several problems near the start of pre production with location scouting as I couldn’t locate the perfect location that I wanted to make my film feel and look like the Manhunt game. In the end I found a church that would do and then with a lot of pre production work on the Macs, this included adjusting the shots gamma making it lighter and darker where necessary, adjusting the contrast making it a bolder contrast or a suttle contrast between the shots colour, by doing these various effects I could achieve the dank feel I was going for at the start.

Getting actors was also a bit tricky as my film mostly required the older generation to act in my film, and seeing I don’t know any older men this was my first problem. Fortunately my mum knew several willing actors through the church who were quite happy to act.

The second problem was when they were available to shoot, although my film did take place mostly at night time it was still hard to timetable my film so all of the actors were available on near enough the same time as many of them do have full time jobs and families to worry about. In the end though we did get it sorted but it meant that I would need to shoot bits and pieces over various different days etc. Another issue was actually getting time to shoot in the church, as it being a church its open most days of the week for various church related activities, in the end the only days I was able to shoot were Saturday night and a couple of hours on Tuesday and Thursday, the rest of the time the church was doing stuff.

For some of the scenes I needed to have eyes scratched into the walls as they would tie in parts of my film, like who scratched the eyes and was it linked to the murder, the flashback of the asylum patient with the same eyes scratched on the walls of his room would wrap this up for the audience. Now I couldn’t just go about scratching eyes into the church walls, they wouldn’t allow it, so I had to think of away around this. After much thinking I though what if I were to take stills of the room, like stop motion and draw the eyes onto the walls using the Photoshop software, after doing a few trial pieces this proved to be a great idea and it worked perfectly.

When I set out to make a short film I had imagined it to be a dark crime thriller which mise en scene similar to that of the videogame Manhunt, and the lighting of Saw. I feel that I did achieve most of my vision, I’m pleased with the mise en scene and how it appeared although I’m not happy with the contrast between light and dark, but that’s down to camera quality, and it’s something to my knowledge I couldn’t change with the equipment I had. I’m fairly happy with my vision I had at the start and my films final outcome

Unfortunately the audience didn’t react to my film in the way I had wished them to, many of them were confused by the eyes on the walls and the cloaked person popping up everywhere and half of the time they didn’t understand what was going on as far as the storyline was, many people even found it to be more comedy than dark crime thriller which was quite upsetting. I feel this feedback I received was down to my own fault, I didn’t make the story clear enough and I feel I should have done better to make the story more clear. It was clear enough to me, that’s why I though it was fine, but I didn’t think about how the audience would interpret it.

Over my production I encountered various problems which were quite large blows to my film in how it would appear and feel towards the audience, at the start of filming I thought time wasn’t going to be an issue and I felt I could get all my story fitted into those 5 minutes, but as time progressed I found that it was going to be harder to include everything I wanted into my film, in the end I did have to cut out a few scenes but I made sure to try and keep as many of the key scenes as possible to prevent the audience getting too confused by the story

The problems with getting time to shoot in the church was overcome by my mum talking to various church goers to see when the church would be free for me to shoot, these times were then given to the actors and I asked if these times suited for the filming, most of them could make it on the various days but on a couple of occasions work kept them back or there was an emergency thing going on in the church preventing me from acting. The eyes on the walls were overcome by me using my Photoshop skills to paint the eyes in and by using still frames instead of moving image. This was a lot harder and time consuming to do than it sounds and I found it was hard to seamlessly link up the frames to make it look like one flowing moving image shot, in the end though I feel I overcame this problem.

From this experience I found that if you are making a low budget short film its better to see what location and what actors you can get before you plan your film, something I found out, I made my story up then had weeks of panicking trying to find a location and actors. Don’t leave all the filming to the last minute get the bulk of it done as soon as possible, as it can take longer to edit that what you had planned, but if there is anything you need to change try and shoot it again as soon as possible don’t leave it until the last week etc. I found that you can always improvise, if you have a problem with the editing or the shooting phase there is always something you can do you overcome it, it might not look as perfect as you wanted it to but its better than nothing. Don’t make your story too complicated as it won’t fit into the five minutes that you have, make your story simple but good at the same time. this was a problem I found which had a big impact on my film in the end.