For my Media AS I was given the task of making a short film, the short film could have been made in any way we chose, however, the film must include: At least one line of dialogue, a conversation between at least two people, titles and an opening shot of a character coming into view.
To start the film Graham (Who co-produced the film) and I scouted out an ideal location for our short film, after much scouting we decided that our media classroom would work best as it was far from any background noise and had some good props we could work with. After finding an ideal location for the film, Graham and I wrote the script and story board.
I felt as though the films cinematography worked well as all angles were well thought out as we planned them carefully in the storyboarding stage of making the film.
The film started off with a good title sequence in which we used the typewriter feature on Final Cut I liked this style of title as it gave vintage spy connotations to our film. The film then faded into the image of an empty corridor with a door in view at medium shot, Graham then walked into shot and opened the door, the film then reverse cut to a long shot of the other side of the door showing Graham looking through and an eye-level close up shot of me looking tense. The film then cut to a close up POV shot of Graham opening the door, this giving the audience empathy with Graham'c character entering into an intense environment.
The next scene in which Graham confronts me I felt could have been improved greatly, however, I feel as though i have gained knowledge on how not to make a film through this as due to the cameras microphones not being very powerful, Graham and I decided to edit the sound in later using recording equipment. Despite this in theory being a very good idea, it did not work and ruined the continuity of the film and gave connotations of a poorly dubbed martial arts film. Another problem we had with dubbing the dialogue was that we had to not show our mouths as we spoke as it would reveal the poorly edited dubbing, this made the mise-en-scene messy in places as the audience could not see the face of those talking.
However the next scene I felt worked very well as we used a high angle (Scripted as a birds eye view but height limitations we had to settle for a high angle). I feel as though the high angle shot worked very well to show the body language of the two characters from above. We ended the film on a cliffhanger as Graham opened the suitcase which was a Macguffin, revealing the evidence only to the character and not to the audience.
I am somewhat pleased with the final product of our work and have learned a very valuable lesson, I feel as though this lesson will benefit me greatly in future film making.
