Production Analysis

1. Pre-Production:
Spencer & I initially scripted 3 idea treatments for our film. Our final decision came down to which was the
most straightforward to film as we have lacked resources, money & time. Our other ideas involved the
countryside & multiple characters which we could simply not shoot. The treatment we chose was in many
ways the most interesting, but it also easily accessible. After we had chosen our film, we moved onto making
a storyboard for our opening sequence. The story board included shot distances, angles and duration. This
helped us have a clear idea of how we wanted our final product to be, as well as helping us during the shoot.
We didn't write a script as our sequence involves no dialogue, however we had a list of directions that we
wanted our actor to follow. After we were set on our film, we were both assigned specific roles for the film,
however as there were only two of us, we shared out the roles equally. In our final couple of lessons before
the shoot, we established a list of props that we could both contribute towards the film. We also decided to
shoot at spencers house as he has a quiet area for exterior shots. We felt both prepared & confident heading
into the shoot as we were both on the same page of how we were going to make the film & the outcome we
wanted from it.
Production:
Our shoot turned out to be more problematic than we had expected. As we didn't have equipment such as a
steady cam, we had to hold the camera with our hands for any moving shots. This caused a shake in the shot
that we didn't want. We also found it hard to shoot a whole shot without being interrupted by a car or
person. This only added to the time as we knew we had to get a suitable shot to take back to school for
editing. For the interior shots, we found it hard to get a lighting which we could agree on. We were going
together light the room using sunlight through the window or lights in the house. Both these forms of
lighting created problems in our shot ( the sunlight made our shot too back-lit & the light shots gave our
picture a yellow hint) however we were both staisfied with our final product. Despite we problems that we
encountered, we were satisfied with what we finished with and we have time for a re-shoot, if necessary.
Post Production:
We started our post production by editing a rough cut to identify what problems we have and therefore
make it easier when coming to edit our final product. We started by grading each of our shots out of 3 so
that when we came to edit it was easy for us to identify the good shots from the bad ones. This took time
but was ultimately a huge time saver. We initially cut together a series of shots without any additional
content to get an idea of how long our film would be. Our rough cut came to 3:30 minutes which was 1
minute too long. When we came to edit our final product we had to be cautious about where we were going
to cut down as we could had left out time and space. We opted to use jump cuts in one shot to take out 20
seconds as well as use jump cuts we which had always wanted to. We also used a series of action matches to
take time out of a sequence & try to keep the pace of the scene at a similar level (throughout). We found it
difficult to find non-copy righted music that suited the mood we wanted, but eventually we found something
that worked although we were not 100% satisfied. We came across a few technical issues when using premier
pro, so we used guidance from the internet to try to fix it. Although it could be tedious, I found editing was
the most enjoyable part of the whole film process as we could stamp our ideas and techniques on the film.