The Prisoner : Evaluation

We have completed our first attempt at a short film! I have thoroughly enjoyed the whole process of producing this piece and I simply cannot wait to improve my skills even further and track my progress throughout the course on this blog.
This film is about someone who has been held captive in the middle of no where, where he is interrogated.

What went well?

From the very beginning I had a good feeling about this short film, as when me and Rhiann sat down and created the storyboard for it came to use easily and we were bouncing ideas of each other. We very quickly came up with a brilliant plan of how we were going to compose the shots and which types of shots to use for each piece of dialogue.

Then, with the filming I felt like that went brilliantly too. We were privileged to work with two great actors. The filming took a long time however we got a lot of footage to choose from so that we could choose the appropriate ones.

I feel like the majority of the task went brilliantly. I am particularly pleased with certain camera movement shots we took. My favorite shot is the low angle shot of Kieran walking towards the camera in scene 1. I love the way the camera is moving with his walk as it adds a touch of verisimilitude. I also like the composition of that shot as he is perfectly in the middle of the frame with the the cloudy sky as a backdrop,

I am also very pleased with the way the interrogation scene flows. I feel like the editing of the conversation makes it seem very life like as it they were actually having a conversation, this was because it was edited so that the speech took up the whole clip instead of having pauses in between each line,
In the part where NUMBER 6 breaks down onto the floor and NUMBER 2 is laughing evilly, we used an effect called 'ghosting' which connotes the confusion and distress he is feeling, I am very pleased with how this looks, especially with his laughter overlapping his screaming.

To begin with I was unsure on what audio we would use to create an eery atmosphere in the first scene of Kieran walking through the deserted area. However we found the perfect clip which sounded creepy and spooky, which we repeated though out the first scene. We also overlapped this with another audio clip which added a soft ghostly sound to accompany louder sounds.

Were there any problems? If so how would you combat them next time?

We encountered a fair few problems through out the making of this film.

To me, the main problem was the lighting. As I have talked about in a previous post, the lighting changes numerous times where is is not meant to. This was due to weather conditions and a lamp breaking mid-filming. If I was to do this again I would of allocated more time into filming where possible to make sure that if one day the weather conditions arent correct then we can change it to a different day. I would also come to the shoots prepared with extra lighting equipment to ensure that the film has continuity.

In terms of the planning and filming, that was the only problem we came across, including the fact we did not have very much time to plan and film it.

However in terms of editing, looking at the complete video I have noticed a few problems with it. Aside from the bad lighting continuity, the audio files we repeated after each other jump to each clip, making it obvious that it is one clip being repeated. On the other hand I do not think this is very obvious to someone who has not seen the making of it, therefore it is not much of a problem.