Group 8 - 2 Minute Film - Evaluation

'Highlight the skills and knowledge you have gained and developed and show how you have gained them. Provide suggestions for improvement and how these attributes will inform your study in future modules this year'.
Proir to making our two minute Film 'The Death of Office Man' for the narratives module, I had not really done much group work in this way. In the past most of the work I have done involved individual work and then group crits on my own work and other peoples. This meant that when working on 'The Death of Office Man' I became aware of my actions and role in the group and how I came about resolving any problems that occured. Making this two minute film has benefitted my team working abilities, but also my techincal skills in the production process.

In the first stages of making our film we were throwing around various ideas. We didn’t want to rush this stage because this is the main basis for our film, so if this went wrong, so would the rest of our film. Slowly we realised that because we didn’t know each other that well, some good ideas weren’t understood. To resolve this problem we went for a ‘Group 8 Big Breakfast’. This helped us get to know the different personalities in our group so we could put together a solid idea. Through many group meetings, the forum, talking over the internet and texting each other ideas began to come together as we got to know each other. As a group we decided on a few initial ideas for our two minute film. One idea was based around hierarchy in the workplace. We liked the idea of juxtaposing scenes and different points of view portrayed of a character in each scene.1 Our groups technical abilities seemed to split. Chris and Adam were particularly interested in animation and Glyn and I that are into video production, so we thought we could combine this for the final film.Another idea was based around the idea of war, but this was quickly dismissed as the idea developed because it would have been impossible to film in the time and money that we had. Looking back I learnt that more should hav been discussed before deciding on an idea, and we should have looked at more films that related to our idea.

Once we had our idea we decided as a group to individually draw up a storyboard. The main reason for this was to make sure we all thinking along the same lines. The results were as we expected and all the storyboards ended up looking similar. However, looking back with the time that we had we could have each been thinking about differnt areas of our production and when it came to put it all together we would have had much more all detailed idea. This time was not completely wasted, and after this slow process things started to speed up. Glyn and I decided what equipment we would need, and Chris and Adam began to draw their animation ideas. I also began to write down what props we would need for our production, and what we would each need to organise by the filming the next week. This helped me become more motivated in the group and ready to put our ideas into practice.

Beofore filming I was quite nervous because none of us were particularly experts in the studios. However, when we all got together we seemed to work well. We all shared tasks and roles in the studio, none of us were particularly controlling. Even though Glyn was acting he still helped with decisions about lighting, camera work and other small decisions we had to make. The lighting was quite problematic to start with because we all wanted our film to start of in daylight and as the day passed for the lighting to get darker. This didn’t really work because the day lighting looked much harsher and just generally bad. Slowly, and after a big breakfast we resolved the problem that we were having by pointing the lights up to the mirrors around the lights on the ceiling so it bounced back down in a less harsh way than before. We found this looked much more natural and we were happy with the outcome on the camera. However, once we filmed what we thought was a good first half of our filming we had a break. When we got back, we looked at our footage and seemed to take most of the shots again. The change was noticable with the lighting and differnt camera angles, but it looked much better. We started to become more creative whilst we were combining our skills, and we ended up making some stop motion video with the items on the office desk each appearing one by one. This idea wasn't initially in our storyboard but we all thought it looked much better than our original idea which was just a series of zooms and close up of the office items.

Post production is the area I was particularly looking forward to in this project, but it was the most problematic area of our film. Mostly because of technical difficulties concerning hard drives and the compatibility on the computers and also with the computers matrox card. However, we managed to resolve these and our film came together quite quickly. I had done quite alot of editing before on Adobe Premiere, so I didn't want to take over with the editing. I took the role as the decision maker alongside either Chis, or Glyn when they were editing. Adam had not had much experience with Adobe Premiere and wasn't keen to learn at this stage. We were ahead of schedule because our filming was much quicker than we expected.

Once we had the rough edit done, we soon realised we needed some sound. For the sound we decided that we would like to have general office noice, such as, printing, scanning, coughing and general mumblings. So even though our sound was non-diegetic, we wanted it to sound diegetic to give the illusion that our character was actually working in an office. Glyn and I went to the printing shop in the Student Union and kindly asked if we could record sounds, they were more than happy to help and we used these in the final piece. We also went to the library to get random typing noises and coughing, and we then recorded our own key pieces of sound. Overall i was not entirely happy with the sound because I think alongside it we would need some kind of soundtrack because our film doesn't seem to pick up pace, or flow as much as I would have liked it to. However, none of us were musicians, and we would have liked to have used some one elses music, but due to copywrighting laws we didn't follow through with this idea. If given another chance I would have arranged with one of my talented friends at the beginning of the production and asked them to produce a piece of music to go with our idea.

As Chris was putting the animation together, I decided that we needed some kind of introduction to our film, which was in a similar style. The idea came to me in a dream, which sounds weird, but it got me motivated to make something a little bit different. I told Glyn about the idea and he was adamant that i watched the title sequence of Napolian Dynamite because it sounded like it would help me. I loved the way that the title sequence was made and it was quite similar to my idea. However, I wished that I had more time to work on my idea because the title and credits were not something we were thinking about when planning our ideas in the beginning. My first idea for the title sequence was to do a stop motion sequence using pens to spell out the title of our film. However, when i tried to make this, I didn't have enough pens for the whole title and it was hard to squeeze it all in. Instead, I decided to use paperclips and this worked alot better. The idea for the credits kind of just came to me as I was making the title sequence, and I was quite pleased with the way it turned out.

Overall, I have learnt quite alot from this production, especially about team work. Our group seemed to work better when we assigned each people seperate areas to work on and then put them together to see what works and what doesn't work. Since making the film I have been alot more aware of film title sequences, for example in Casiono Royal with the playing cards. It has made me think more about it as an option for something I would like to experiment with in the future, either from the animation side, or from the filming perspective.

1Camilla Insalaco, Online Journal http://camillainsalaco.blogspot.com/