Group Evaluation

At a micro, technical level, how well did you observe the conventions of continuity, the language of film and the grammar of the edit?

In our two minute opening of the scene we wanted our media product to be as realistic as possible. We tried to achieve this by making sure that the mise-en-scene was right, for example the costume, light and so on. In our movie our biggest challenge was to try and make as all the scenes were taken in one day; costume was minor challenge because we had to get the actors to always put the same clothes so that it gives the viewers a sense that the scenes are based in one day. For our media product we took a lot of camera shots in different days therefore this meant that the shots that we took were mixed up, so when we started editing we had to rearrange the different scenes to the right places.


How many mistakes did you make, and did you improve in the main task having made errors in the preliminary exercise?

When we first made our preliminary task we did not take enough shots and the lighting was poor because we positioned the cameras against the sun and the doors where another factor why the lighting changed. While filming our main task, we took account of the lighting and tried to use the sun to our advantage.
We also made a decision that we would take the shots outside in one day; this would not affect the lighting through our opening scene of our movie.
While filming we tried to obtain as many shots as possible to make our opening scene as effective as possible.


At a more symbolic, macro level, how does your fiction film reflect or challenge the conventions of the genre or type you are working in? Will it fulfil the ‘contractual’ nature of film genre or will it subvert expectations deliberately?

First our main task should have been carefully thought through because we made the first mistake by choosing the wrong genre. Our first idea of genre was an opening of a horror drama, but we over a period of time we had to change our genre due time pressure. We started filming and made out that our genre is going to be a teen drama, because of the clear idea we had about the story that we hadn’t had while trying to film a horror drama. While filming our main task with the idea of genre we are going to use, we had no problems to figure out how we are going to film the next shots.
We represented teen drama with several techniques such as having a young and handsome actor and a beautiful actress (who is so annoying). The two teenagers represent a stereotypical couple. Once the young girl broke up with her boyfriend he then goes through a phase of misery that might lead him to his death, but this is unknown to the audience.


Are there any elements of deliberate pastiche or parody, where you ‘play’ with the genre’s codes and history? Are there any intertextual moments where you hint at a reference to another film?

There is no parody of any other movie, but our opening is like a typical love drama, it is really cliché like.


What kinds of audience pleasure are you trying to provide, and how confident are you that you have delivered on this promise?

The audience that we are wanting to pleasure are women and teenagers. We think that women will be a good target audience because they are more sensitive and will be attracted to these kinds of films, unlike men who are more masculine and are attracted to violent films rather than romantic. I believe that this film will attract many teenagers for several reasons such as the story, which is about a young teenage boy who is madly in love with a girl, these types of films attract a lot of teenagers because there is an interest in teenagers that they have on these types of storyline.


How did you manage the group dynamics, equipment and resources, interim deadlines and the necessary collaborative nature of film making?

As we began filming we didn’t plan the work well, we didn’t really know where to start, how to film and who’ll be the actor(s). We changed the storyline several times, as well as the genre of our movie. We had to deal with a lot of problems till we got to our final choice (teen drama). First of all we started filming different scenes to get ideas how we could effectively start our film opening. We chose one of the first shots we took and started filming the rest of our opening. Only with a few shots we made out the whole storyline of the movie that is really complex and not easy to understand what is very unlikely for a teen drama. We used different methods to get to different view of shots and accomplished everything with success. We cut the little film clips together so it fit’s perfectly together and we tried to make the shots tell the story instead of a person talking through the whole opening, that might look special compared to other movies, but that’s what we wanted to achieve. We organised everything very well at the end, because at the beginning we had quite a lot of organisation problems with who would film, act, edit, update the blog, storyline etc. We started with a lot of confusion and problems but we managed to solve all of these problems. Everyone did a bit of everything, we shared our knowledge to improve our opening, for e.g. if someone was better at designing the production logo the others got shown how to do it so we where able to help out each other in every task. We started filming way too fast so we finished earlier compared to the other groups. We didn’t know what to do after we “finished” our opening, but after a while realized that there where some mistakes in our opening such as copyrighted music. Trying to improve our opening took us again back and we had to redo some tasks, such as the film title.


What health and safety and logistical problems did you solve?

First of all we had to make out what our genre is going to be. We had a lot of organisation problems at the beginning as we already said. The main problem was finding the perfect genre for our movie and which actors we are going to use to make it look like a very good teen drama. We had to organise the actors so they would both be able to film at the same time, and be wearing appropriate clothing what wasn’t as easy as we thought. But after a while we organised ourselves and found a way to manage the given task.
One other problem we had to solve later on is that we used copyrighted music without noticing that we weren’t allowed to it. So we had to find an un-copyrighted track that would fit to the opening sequence of our movie. We took a lot of time to find a good music track that actually fits to the opening, the copyrighted song was just so perfect that we couldn’t really find a good substitution, but we had to and found a music track that fitted to our movie’s opening, but still wasn’t as good as the copyrighted track what made our opening so good.
How did you organise your human resources – the people involved in the production?
Our main problem was organisation like said before. We had some problems finding the second actor and planned to have a third actor but we changed then
Our story again and needed only one additional actor (2 actors). After that we had not much problems with our human resources and could film continuously without a problem.
The actors didn’t have to learn a lot of text because we wanted the shots to explain the story instead of someone speaking the whole opening through, so we didn’t have problems with learning text or even acting.


How did you manage actors, locations, costumes and props? Remember that deciding NOT to use a particular strategy [e.g. not to use any props] is also a creative decision.

That was one of the most important points in our opening. Without any good props and locations the story couldn’t be told by only showing good shot’s without much talking. We had to think clever and find the perfect locations fitting to our movie. The locations where at first Henri’s flat (mixed common room of one of the boarding houses) and then we moved on to a long walk along the Silent Walk (school campus) and finished with the ending scene in Michael Kirk’s chapel that gave a perfect feeling for sadness and depression. With the long walk along Silent Walk we tried to explain the sadness and depression of the main character (Henri) who was really sad after breaking up with his girlfriend, the slow and long walk explained everything, without any talking only a light, sad ambiance background music and the main character’s footsteps along the Silent Walk, alone.

Our main and only prop was a big kitchen knife. The knife was a symbol for anger, pain, love, sadness and suicide, even if the a kitchen knife is more symbolizing violence but as well pain, we thought it would fit more for a method of suicide than hanging, taking poison or whatever kind of other methods. The kitchen knife should make the audience believe that he will kill himself for sure, seeing such a big knife can really give a special feeling while watching someone lifting it as he would try to kill himself.

The costumes that we wanted to use for the opening are casual teenager clothes. All of the clothes are the actors own and that gives another realistic feeling that we really wanted to show, like a normal situation in life. But we tried as well to use more black coloured clothing to make the right ambience, and it would have a better contrast while changing the film bits to black and white.

We had problems to find actors but could solve that problem after a while. The actors didn’t have to learn a lot of text because, like I already explained we wanted the shots to tell the story for us, something that is not very common in today’s film industry, but I’ve already seen that in several movies (mostly unknown movies/ not mainstream -> Hollywood).


How did storyboarding and creating a shooting script work in practice? Did you make creative decisions to depart from the original plan? For what reasons and with what outcomes?

Personally we thought that the storyboarding/creating a shooting script wasn’t helpful at all. The storyboard might have been a little help but how can we know how our film is going to be like if we didn’t even start filming?
Our method was to find inspiration through different, mostly random shots taken by our group. That’s how we started progressing and seeing our storyboard virtually in our mind. We imagined our story, every member in their way and started to collect the ideas of every member of the group. It might sound very difficult to make a story with only a few ideas but we had the perfect ideas and put them together like a puzzle.
We processed through our task with an incredible speed, we also did a few mistakes probably because of the pace we had but the end product that came out was really impressive and we where proud of what we achieved.
Our end product is like a piece of art, you can’t really tell if it’s bad or good, you’re decision if you like it or not.


Although time management may seem a less exciting aspect of the creative media practice, it is possibly the most important – how did you manage your time, and with what success?

When we first started our editing we realised that we had too many shots to deal with, so we deleted the shots that were not needed and then started editing our film. When we where half way through of finishing our film we realised that we it was too long, but we waited until we finished our whole media product. At the end we found out that it has to be 2 minutes long, but however our film was 2:43 minutes long; because of this error we had to cut down the scenes that were not needed, this summed up us deleting most of our shots so we chose the best scenes that fitted together and cut down the time to 2:12 minutes which was fine.


How did digital technology enable you to develop creatively and are there examples of the technology obstructing or preventing your creative flow?

To make our 2 minutes opening of the film, we used a digital video camcorder. We took coupe of shots, just to be in the safe side and if error were made in any shot, the same type of shot can be replaced with of the mistaken shot. Because we did filming in school, and outside the campus we were not allowed to film at the Duffus Castle, (which is outside the campus) due to restrictions. This prevented us from filming, but lucky we found some other place in the campus which looks similar the Michael Kirk, which we were looking for, the creepiness of the places had the same feeling every time we looked at it. So then we finally decided to film at the Michael Kirk. Also the filming tools which we had were only the video camcorder and a tripod, unlike real professional tools, such as for a tracking shot we did not have the tracks, to hold the camera firmly, and so we found it difficult to film using a tracking shot, where Henri the character walks towards the church (Michael Kirk).


How did you respond to the initial brief with the audience in mind?

Our task was to create a 2min. opening of a movie. We started by choosing our genre which was a horror drama however our opening scene did not match the genre; therefore we had to change the genre to teen drama. We made it look like a teen drama with a dark ambiance, such as the teen/horror drama Twilight. We wanted to aim our product to a wide audience by making our movie 12A, even if it contains a few violent scenes. For various reasons there are no sex or intimate scenes that are usually shown in teen dramas. We tried to replace those scenes by adding another genre, which was horror to make the movie as interesting and thrilling as possible like a good movie is.


How did your analysis and research into the type of film you selected impact on the creative process in pre-production?

Before we picked the genre we watched different trailers with different genres to inspire us. We watched a wide variety of horror trailers because that was the genre that we first chose, but then changed it to teen drama because we thought that we would address and attract a wide audience because of the popularity of teen dramas, such as New Moon which has been played in nearly over 4,000 theatres.
After a lot of changes of the genre our group came together to brainstorm and that’s how the genre teen/horror drama came up. We started filming and had no problems with continuity of our filming and no big conflict in our group anymore.
Before we started filming we inspired ourselves by watching several teen drama trailers and then combining them together with the horror trailers we watched and as a result we came up with the idea of the genre teen/horror drama that is a very unusual combination. While watching a lot of trailers we analyzed them, and the genre to understand how they are represented.


In filming and editing, how did you ensure that the meaning would be apparent to the audience? What creative decisions did you make in planning, rehearsing, filming and editing that were influenced by your sense of the audience and possible layers of interpretation?

To ensure that the meaning would be apparent to the audience, we kept the storyline fairly simple, and not too complicated. So they can easily understand it. To do this, we edited our opening scene visibly, so all the scenes are in order instead of random scenes at different times. This would have confusing the audience and therefore they would not be able to understand what is happening in the scene. We rehearsed a lot the scene where one of the characters gets slapped, but to give it an real effect to the audience, we took the shot from different angles, and so we decided that we are going to keep 2 different angle shots for the slapping scene.


How did the audience respond when you trialled aspects of your film? Are there a variety of possible interpretations of your opening sequence that will depend on the cultural situation of the viewer?

When we produced our 2 minute opening scene we wanted to get feedback from our audience which were our classmates and teacher. The feedback that we were worried about the most was from our Teacher Mrs.Downes. The feedback that we got from her were that the scenes were interesting, graphics were good; however these were the good feedbacks but the bad ones were that our opening scene contained too much black and white, the story through the scenes were boring and also that our title did not match the genre of the film. So we improved on these factors and changed our title of the film. My group, which I was working with, was multicultural such as Ahmed who is originally from Pakistan, Henri who is from Switzerland. I think that because we had a multicultural group and have seen different films we had different ideas that we had combined to make our 2 min opening scene. I think that people from different countries and cultures will have different views on the film that will also make a big impact.


Written by Henri Yueksel, Sultan MacKinnon and Ahmed Mohammed