#tim'sessay

Premonition – short film evaluation

 The final unit as a class, was to create an idea that then later on developed into a script in order to create a short drama. Each person in the class had to create this idea and also write out their scripts, the best scripts were chosen and later on people were put into groups to actually make this short drama come to life.  I was put into a group that 4 people including myself, Ellen, Annie and Emma, we was handed over the script called ‘Premonition’ and that was written by Lucy Daniel.

This story was mainly evolved around one girl, who of course was the main character. Different members of crew also had very important roles such as the mum and the close friend. The first step we took as a group was to understand the story itself, we had to do this by reading over the script a number of times and as we read it we should be imagining the different types of shots for that specific part of the script. Once we had all come to an understanding of the script we came together as a group to talk about the different types of shots that we could imagine for certain parts of the scene, brainstorming together helped us because some shots were better than I thought they would be. Our director, Annie, had her input on what types of shots were to be used then she would come to me to ask my opinion, she handed over to me the roll of DOP (Director of Photography) so I would just help out the directors image in their heads come to the camera screen.  She also made a few changes to the script because there were some parts of it that we just wouldn’t be able to put on screen, so changes were made and we were happy with changes. Filming in front of a pharmacist was one of the changes, because it is unlikely that they would allow us to do so and also the area it was based in would also be difficult to film.

 The role I was given was DOP, as I mentioned before, I think that I was fit for this role because I am quite good on camera as I have been told in the past and that I have a good eye and also good creativity.  My role included me being on camera and listening to what the director has to say, the director would throw out an idea of a shot and I would disagree or agree. If I were to disagree then I would have to have my own input and tell the director why I think this shot would be better and more cinematic for this scene.

 For our casting we used a website called ‘Casting Call Pro’, from this website we were able to obtain two unpaid actors. In order for them to come to us we would have to write a profile of the characters that were available and also we had to write out a brief of the story. Doing this will allow them to pick whether or not they would be happy to play a part in this story.

 All in all, our shooting took about two full days and we didn’t really come across any problems at this point. We took a variety of shots that included different angles and different areas of the house and we also had quite a lot of cover shots to fill in, but we did have enough footage to use on our timeline. After the shootings we placed the equipment back and started to upload our footage from the blackmagic SSD cards to the Apple MACs. We renamed our files as you do for every project, but this time we worked from the hardrive so all our work was on one hard drive. The edit itself took about 2 weeks to work on and we were shown by the director all the rough edits that she had done. As a group we were happy with the final edit and it looked really good and professional. The final bit was left to me, this is where our problems occurred. I was asked by my director just to do the colour correction because blackmagic doesn’t film in full colour and sort out the audio levels to make sure they’re all within their limits and it sounds good.  The hard drive that we used to edit on was also used for the showreel, I don’t think this is the reason for our work to go missing but after it was used,  majority of the files went missing. We worked from the hard drive and renamed all our footages, when uploading the footage they are uploaded as ‘blackmagic_129’ or something along those lines but because we renamed to make it easier on ourselves to edit, when we went searching for the files we were unable to find majority of them. The few that we did find I was able to reconnect the media but it still couldn’t make up the full story. So unfortunately because this big problem occurred we were unable to export the full video.

 There are images of the timeline after we had lost majority of our clips, if you look to the left of the programme you will see that majority of the clips have a red line in, which means that the clip is not connected and cannot be used.