EMP EVALUATION

Evaluation

 

First thing I decided after the specialist project was that I wanted to make a short film with dialogue for the extended major project. I saw that as natural progression from doing a silent short film.

I have no experience of ever having written a script and the last time I wrote something vaguely close to a script for a short film was writing stories in English lessons in  year 11 at school. I was excited, scared and to be honest not all together greatly confident about writing film dialogue but to get good I need practise of course!.

I wanted the idea to be centred around one or two children. I decided this because I thought it would be easier to write for children because what they say is not always serious so it gives me room to write almost meaningless conversation which is hopefully fun to watch but it’s just child’s waffle really and play talk so I didn’t have to worry too much about making it realistic. Doing it like this I thought it may be easier to write as I don’t want to give myself too big a challenge as I haven’t written a script before. One of the reasons possibly for why I wanted to use children as actors was because I felt slightly anxious about the possibility of working with a stranger of my age or maybe slightly older. I felt anxious because around strangers sometimes I feel I do not have an abundance of confidence for me to interact socially as I would like. Thinking about this situation I pictured myself as slightly tense but then again I also felt similar about working with children on this project and when it came to the shoot (and working with child actors) I was fine because I realised I just need to get on and do it to the best of my ability otherwise the whole thing is just a waste of time. In the future I’ll use actors of close to my age and I’m sure I’ll be slightly nervous about working with them but I’m happy in knowing that when the time comes as long I am confident in the idea then I’ll be confident I can do a good job. As long as I have confidence in my ideas then I’ll be more relaxed, work better, have a good time in doing so and the end result will be of higher quality.

The first idea I had was about two children coming across music for the first time in their lives. I felt this idea would be good for me because I could use my love of music combined with my academic work which would mean I enjoy it more which would overall make me more enthusiastic to work and that would hopefully result it a good outcome. The problem with this idea was that I felt I had a good starting point but that was it. I needed to know straight away what would happen at the end and work back but I didn’t have an end. With the last project the idea was that the sun was exploding and would destroy the earth. So with that idea I knew what was going to happen at the end of the film and that made it possible for me to work out what I wanted to happen throughout the story because everyone had limited time so it gave reason for things to happen. I know it’s best to come up the ending and work back but I deliberated for weeks working on the music idea because I liked it a lot but nothing was happening I couldn’t work from it and felt I was wasting my time so I scrapped it. At this point I felt under pressure due to the fact that I was around 4 or 5 weeks into the project and I had made no progress at all. So again using children characters I thought it may be fun to include an imaginary friend in my story. With some of the elements of my story I wanted to make it quite personal. The story is that there is a boy who lives with his mum and his dad passed away some years ago. He is about to start secondary school which he’s scared about it and he has an imaginary friend. His imaginary friend tells him that he has to go and they can’t see each other anymore because he is too old to have an imaginary friend and he has to brave it alone in the big wide world so to speak. The last scene is on the boys birthday after the imaginary friend has gone and he receives a photo from his mum of his dad when hid dad was a little boy. The boy in the photo is the same as his imaginary friend so that’s the kick at the end which I think leaves the story on a good note. It’s personal to me in how the boy feels about starting school, I felt like that at the start of uni. Also as corny as it sounds it’s deeply personal for me because it’s about losing someone close to you who you feel will always be watching over you. These are quite serious messages I wanted to convey in the film, at first I thought this would be light hearted and just a bit of fun but there is a lot of meaning. With the finishes film I don’t think I conveyed that meaning entirely. If I was to make it again I would attempt to write scenes which exhibit more clearly the themes I wanted to be shown.

It took a few drafts to get to the final script. Then I needed actors and actors between the ages of 10 and 12 are extremely sparse. So one of my proudest moment of this project is how much work I put in to find actors for the film. I had my dates for when I wanted to shoot so I had a time limit and set deadline in my head. I searched for actors by emailing and telephone and internet resources. I spoke with every drama school in and around Bristol, countless drama teachers, companies, family friends, neighbours, I posted adverts on extra and acting websites, I messaged actors on a number of websites. It was good to be busy. Again with the whole slight fear of speaking to stranger’s thing I spoke a lot to people on the telephone and overcame that hurdle fairly well. It was around 6 weeks into the project and I was a bit desperate so to be frank I settled on the first actors I found or the first to reply, they would have been better actors out there then the ones I used. If had a concrete idea from the get go then I would of managed my time better. If I worked as hard as I did at the start to following weeks then I would have had a solid story.

The biggest problem with the project is that it was not planned as well I could. One of the main problems that arose from this was that a week before shooting I found out I would be filming on a HD camera. But not until after shooting did I realise that I had no idea of how to export the files off the card into final cut and then into after effects in HD quality so I spent a lot of time with a purchased software converting files off the card so they were adaptable to edit. This took a couple weeks of failure before success, more time lost. Then I had no knowledge of codecs in final cut so after cutting it together in final cut it took a a lot of trials before it came out HD. So it was a mistake of mine to not read up on how I should be exporting HD footage.

With the finished film I’m happy with it in that it’s prime purpose is to build up my portfolio for the search for future employment and this piece of work does a good job in exhibiting my skills in editing, creativity with the images, how to make a story fit together and also importantly the sound and music. I had fun doing the music, it was one of the most fun moments of the project. I obviously don’t want to make short films that are generic of popular culture and bland and I feel the music I use is definitely a plus point in the film and helps make a difference. I’ve learnt a lot from this project, even though I may not be entirely happy with the final film, it has been the most valuable experience of the past 3 years.

Simon Hutchins