Completed short film reflection!

Reflecting on our final short film I believe it was a success. The merge between drama and documentary worked well to interest and engage the audience. Looking back at our class feedback I noticed that although the audience seemed a little confused with the mix between drama and documentary it interested them in the narrative and made them ask questions.

The locations we used in our short film were chosen as we believed they would be aesthetically pleasing. This is because we chose areas that had bright and colourful graffiti which we believed contrasted with our characters monologues but still made them more interesting.
We had some gritty, urban looking locations as we wanted a simple location that would not distract the audience from the emotion and message of the monologues. However maybe our choice for this location overlooked a few factors. For example one audience believed that this location aimed to represent our characters and target an urban audience which was not our main goal. Our main focus on this area was because it was a simple, accessible location that was quite enough for us to film.
The music we used at the beginning of the piece was simple and not too emotional as we did not want to influence the audience’s views or feelings on the piece but rather for them to come to their own conclusions about it. The music towards the end of the piece was slower and more emotional as it gave a more serious tone to the piece. I believe the music worked well as it kept the audience engaged by making the piece not as static as it could have been. Also with the opening titles, we edited the facts so that they would be cut to the beat adding some interest and rhythm to our piece.

We did have some technical difficulties during filming such as sound through the boom mic. This was as it was a windy day and the boom mic picked up the sound of the wind. This difficulty did affect the quality of our film and we did try and adjust it during editing. We managed to decrease the wind sound slightly but if we had adjusted it any more the monologue would not be loud enough to hear. To improve this we could have filmed on a less windy day or walked away from the wind and not against it, however we did the best we could and made sure that the monologue was still audible.

Our characters were all very successful as they were not over acting or over the top and they gave an accurate representation of the characters we wanted to convey. We wanted actors and actresses that would deliver the monologue effectively and so it would be believable to the audience, which I believe we achieved.

The scripting of our monologues was also very successful as it was realistic, informative and conveyed our message effectively. However as our characters were largely based on the talent we could get to play them the scripts had to be adjusted accordingly. For example with Matt’s character, I had to adjust the script so it would represent a younger character than we had first intended. Also with Ashley’s script a few changes had to be made because initially this character was meant to be male and older than the actress that was available.

There was a slight issue when it came to representation , which we may have failed to recognize during casting and filming. The issue was that there were not enough characters in our film to represent a wide ethnic range. This was because we had very little time to find people of many different ethnic backgrounds who were able and willing to feature in our film. If we had more time and a budget to cast talent we could improve this because the people would be available with the right skills.
All in all I believe this project has taught me a lot about my skills and strengths whilst also enlightening me on my weaknesses and what I need to improve on. I learnt that my script writing skills are one of my strengths as our audience all agreed that this was a strong point of our film because the script was simple but relatable. This project also gave me the opportunity to be more involved in planning such as storyboarding and casting which I enjoy and believe I am always successful in, however I have learnt about the impact representation and stereotypes can have on an audience therefore in future I will give this more thought. Also if we had more time we could have improved our film by casting a few more professional actresses .