As preparation for my A2
coursework, the course class were divided into groups and given the task to
recreate thirty seconds of a music video/short film. My group consisted of
Connor McDonnell, Jay Bell, Josh Worthington and myself. As a group, we chose
to recreate a short film called Sinéad by the band Within Temptation. The
four of us were decided on key roles for us to play throughout the task. I was
in charge of the editing of the footage. Josh and Jay were both in control in
directions. And Connor was the group’s producer as well as cinematographer.
However, we all contributed evenly overall.
Before even starting any filming, we had to go through the pre-production. This involved story boarding our shots, as well as creating a production plan with inclusion of a list of available actors and available locations as well as the time and dates of which we planned to film.
During the production process, we encountered many problems with recreating the same feel of the original video. This was due to the short space of time we had at create the video, while having to have key members, such as actors outside the group, being free to contribute. The locations never really had the same feel as the ones in the original video for we were limited to using other areas apart from inside the college. Filming within a college always gives the film or video an office-like feel, however, I feel in our video, we avoided the office feel with the use on dark lighting and focused spotlighting. Additionally, we were set back a bit due to the loss of our original location that we had previously filmed in. Therefore, we had to improvise, and had to be careful not to show too much of the location within other shots. Our film was filmed in a total of four different locations, whereas the original is filmed in one. However, I feel that we managed to keep the continuity of the film.
We also encountered problems during the post-production process, as we unfortunately lost a memory card with some footage on it. As well as this, there are a limited amount of editing suites available, therefore we could only edit when our specifically dedicated suite was free from use. Also, the film featured a quite instrumental piece in the background. We did not know the name of the specific piece and could not find it out either; therefore, we once again improvised and found a song that sounded very similar. Fortunately, we manage to complete the task before the set deadline.
From the task I have learnt that the preproduction stage is vital if you’re expecting to film the same location over a course of more than one filming session. Additionally, you cannot always rely on actors to be available as they may have other priorities. Overall, I was disappointed with the outcome of our video; however, this was due to the fact that me and my group knew the mistakes in it. When shown to the class, no one seemed to notice the mistakes that we could distinctly see.
