Over the experience of creating a small film I've learnt a lot in terms of
production film and even planning. this whole project has been a good learning
experience from the start and as helped me improve my skills with all of the
main aspects of making a film.
for planning, this is where i was the most unsure of what to do. i knew
that things such as scripts and storyboards had to be created in order for
everyone involved to know what to say and do but the research part was very new
to me. i particularly enjoyed the part where we had to analyse other media
products such as films to get an idea of how films were made and how editing
was done etc. But, looking at other media really inspired me to want to create.
The main thing i struggled with was writing them down in a way which was
readable, it was a little too easy to over complicate something in ways which
became hard to understand witch was a bad way to start my research, but after
time i managed to simplify my work in the best way possible. Another thing
that i struggled on in the planning area was research on specific parts of the
film like characters, places, costumes, props and other things. This may have
been because i was unfamiliar to the film noir genre so everything felt brand
new and not something i could write of the top of my head so a lot of time was
spent making sure my research was corrupt and could helpful towards my final
product. The part i enjoyed the most was creating a scripted and a storyboard,
even though the one i wrote was not the final one we made i still had a
interesting experience writing on. I learnt a lot about how scripts and
storyboard were written and drawn in a professional way, especially in the
script part. creating the setting in the script and drawing the storyboard alongside
was a new thing that I've done when creating a project like this, it was a good
way to have everything that ended to be done written down so people would know
what they are doing but for seeing improvements that could be made before they
were filmed. deciding on the final idea for the film was easier than
anticipated, we went with the one that was way more practical to film rather
than the version that required more props locations etc. with that however i
learnt how a film could be changed in a way to fit a budget or a set back which
couldn't be over come. It's very easy to have a perfect vision on a project
that you want but actually getting there can be difficult especially through
not having the right thins to fit the job, so creating something more simple is
definitely better of when starting out. hopefully in the future i can
manufacture something that requires something that has a lot to it. Also while
planning it was very important to keep the viewer in mind, forcing your content
around a particular group of people is something i have done before when
creating content but however this time it was for a very different set of
people so this was again quite new to me. Being able to create something and
people who are into the genre enjoy it is a great feet, it was well worth the
research that came with it. We looked at what common things were put into film noir and brought it into our own with a slight modern twist. we ant over the
stereotypical things that made film noir famous to begin with and included them
into our final piece, things like the femme fatal, the suits that the
detectives wear ever right down to the attitude of all the actors. another
thing as well were the actors themselves, picking the right people to play the
write parts was especially important in the planning stage due to wanting to
make the characters believable in every way possible. The actors we chose we
knew well as friends so working with them was very comfortable for people
because working with complete strangers would have made things harder then it
needed to be and could of taken longer as well.
After the planning stage we of course moved onto recording and editing
parts which i had a lot of experience in doing as of working on things similar
to this before. recording was quite easy, we had a lot of help with camera and
audio to make sure everything was done in the best way it could be, we even
created a homemade boom mic stand that could be held under or over near a
character to hear them better. our location was also well picked as it didn't
have a lot of traffic with people disturbing the area allowing for us to have
the whole day to record without stopping for anyone. we were also lucky in
terms of the weather which allowed us to complete our recordings in only a few
days. We didn't have many problems when recording our project, in fact there
was only just one shot we had to re-record and that was it. After all of our
recording was done we went onto the post-production stage which was the editing
of all the videos, adding things like backing tracks, effects etc. This was the
place i was mostly familiar with, editing videos and audio is stuff I've done
before even starting media so this is where i did my best. Even though I'm used
to editing though, i was completely new to the program we used which was called
"Adobe Premiere Pro." This, even though being completely knew to me,
was in fact not hard to learn. It was quite similar to the other program that
I've used before so there weren't that much that i had to learn other that a
few things when waiting to add or remove audio. We first started the editing
with syncing all the audio we collected, because of not being able to connect
the mic straight to the camera we had to sync the audio manually through the
editing software. This was done by syncing up the camera and the voice recorder
when shooting, we had someone stand in front of the camera while it and the
voice recorder was capturing and had them clap. This is similar to what a
clapperboard does which is give the camera a visual and sound that can be
synced up together in editing to match when the recorder and video started
recording. we could have just not used the recorder to record the audio for our
film but we wanted the audio to be the best it could be because bad audio is
one of the main things that puts people of watching a clip. After the audio was
synced for all the clips and in their respective places in the film we started
altering the look of the film. we improved the lighting in some shots by
highlighting and darkening some areas to make parts stand out form one another,
we also added the black and white filter over all the shots in the film to give
it the classic look that the older film noir movies had. Another thing we did
while editing is add music into the background. this was done to make the
scenes where it was just silent less boring as there were a few moments where
they were quite dull without sound.
In Conclusion i have learnt a lot in the process of film making and wish to
try and make something longer, however this time improving in my research and
over all shooting of the shots in the film.
