7 WHAT I HAVE LEARNED ABOUT FILM MAKING

WHAT DO YOU FEEL YOU HAVE LEARNT IN THE PROGRESSION OF YOUR FULL PRODUCT?

Our first storyboard was a straightforward narrative developing the story of a high-level scientist who works in a secret government facility during World War 2. Our narrative explores his disappearance which his wife suspects is linked to his hush-hush job. She employs a detective to investigate. However, feedback suggested that our narrative lacked drama. We decided to develop our storyboard by implementing flashbacks that are cut into the detective's exploration of the abandoned facility.

During the production of our film Lights out! there were many things that I learned such as techniques and refreshing ideas and creating new ideas. For instance, when doing my research on what storyline we were going to base our film on, I certainly learnt about the thriller genres as well as film noir/neo noir storylines. I also researched a little bit about certain films such as Shutter Island with leonardo DiCaprio and the Jack Nicholson film Chinatown. I was advised to look through books which would help me understand the making of noir films and also helped me understand the proper definition of these genres. With the help of these books, it allowed me to understand more about the character stereotypes in these sorts of movies.

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I also learned about he script making process. As our film was limited to 3 minutes, we had to think smart and plan out a suitable dialogue which would establish character development and building in the time that we were allocated. Me and my peers looked up slang words in the 1950's and typical 1950's language to allow us to understand how people would act back in this era. Also, as we based our film primarily on Shutter Island, our film was going to be slightly Caricature, as it is inspired by 1950's and 1960's mental hospitals and to an extent, is relevant to the events of this genre because it relates to chronically ill people acting out horrific actions to innocent people and these actions symbolise the injustice in the world, as in todays society, there is a lot of innocent killings and some of the scenes in our film relate to that critically.

Time period was also something I had to take into consideration. Our movie was focused on a 1950/1960 genre. We had to ensure everything looked convincing for our film to fit this time period. We had to get suitable props that would be suitable for our film.

Unfortunately we did not have the budget to make the scenes look completely authentic, but for what it was worth we did a good job and there were certain tasks that we needed to do in order to make the film as authentic as possible. For instance, we had to make sure all modern equipment was removed and for the office scene, we had to make the scene look very period based. So we decided to get a vinyl record player, a vintage telephone and a typewriter. This way It gave me a full understanding of authentic film making. I also learned that if the period was ruptured then it would lose interest in the audience and therefore would not make a successful film. At first I did not think that props would have so much significance, but then I realised that they actually became much bigger an played a great part in our film to make it look that much more authentic.







I also learnt a great deal about sound in our film. There was a lot of dialogue in the office scene between the detective and the wife of the missing husband. therefore it was vital that the actor and actress were to speak as clearly as possible because we didn't want the scene to look staged, we wanted to take our time because we wanted this film to be taken seriously. Other important sounds had to be implemented as well. In the blood trail scene, we dropped an object to create an eerie sound. Thought it was a simple task, the noise was overwhelming when we took a few takes, so we had to position ourselves where the noise would not be so loud. this showed me how important it is when creating the mise-en-scene of the movie. the dialogue allowed the audience a clearer vision of what our story is all about.

I also learned deeply how to illustrate suspense to the audience. We thought it would be a good idea to go for a much slower pace which would give a more suspenseful tone. The point of view shots that we did illustrated a much more suspenseful tone as it created the sense that the detective was being watched by someone and the suspense really elevated by this concept. just by a few adjustments to the camera shots created a drastic change in suspense which I was very happy with.

Planning was another key thing that I learned during my production. This is where we organised the cast and crew and organised certain dates for filming too. using Google Docs, this allowed us to plan out the shoots and the timings for the film. After doing this I learned that there is so much planning to do and organisation to do before filming a movie and this startled me a bit and also surprised me. HERE is a link to our shot list for our movie.

Lastly, I learned about the editing process as well. we shot lots of footage for the movie so we could carefully pick out the best takes for each scene that we did.  For all of us this was a very time consuming process as we had to sit through all of the outtakes that we made and we had to decide amongst ourselves which bits of filming was best suited for each scene and we needed to decide which bits of filming were suitable and scenes which were not suitable. Looking back at one of our scenes, we made a flashback scene involving me and Tom Gladstone, the missing husband in our film. This consumed nearly 40% of our film and therefore we decided to edit this out because it was too long.

In the end we used two editing softwares. We used iMovie which is included with all MacBooks as one of my peers owns a MacBook. We also used Final Cut Pro which is a very professional editing software and we were all over this software as it was very good to use and caused lots of good effects in our film. In the end, Final Cut Pro had a lot more effects than iMovie but iMovie was very easy to access and contributed massively to our film editing. We also used iMovie for our preliminary exercise and it was of great use.

Displayed HERE you will be able to see the call sheet and the script that we conformed together on Google Docs.