clip evaluation

Film studies

Our group consisted of four members, me I was the director. I make sure that we had the right locations and props etc for each scene in the clip. Alex our sound editor and costume designer, he created and found the music and sound effects that we have though the clip as well as sorting what we wanted people to wear. Ed our footage editor, who’s job is was to makes our clip run smoothly and to make sure there are no continuity errors and Cleve our cinematographer who choose our shots and filmed our footage.
So to start off we needed do come up with some ideas as to what to do for our clip and one of the ideas that Alex suggested was to have a piece set in a specific time period, we were thinking of setting the scene in a 1940's smokey bar in America or the UK. This was inspired but the noir genre, the black and white 50‘s mystery/murder films. The genre of our film was a Hybrid of Noir/Action. But we had to decide between colour, black and white or a sepia tone.
An idea I had that was similar was a more modern day English grime/gangster film. So the group decided to stay with the idea of a gangster gang film idea and start coming yup with ideas for story and scene and locations we could use and props we would need, we came up with a few script ideas which are on our blog and eventually came up with four characters ( Joe, Kev, Bills and Mucker), some basic scenes (the bar, the toilets and the backstreet scene) and a basic storyline for the film.
One other thing we wanted to sort out before we started to shoot was costumes, now to get with the gangster idea we look at the film reservoir dogs for some ideas and what we found was suits and thin ties with trilby hats etc.
So then we set about shooting some footage, the toilet scene was the first of the scene that we shot and this is were we ran into our first problem. In the scene Bills played by me is attacked in the toilet by an unknown assailant and with all four of us playing main characters in the gang we couldn’t attack ourselves, so we got Cleve’s friend Ollie to come and be part of the scene. This was shot with three different camera shots. The first was a high angle shot that me and Ed decided to use showed me entering and the unknown man coming up behind me to establish where this is and what is happening then I decided to make a match-on-action show from this shot to the next which is a close up of my face to make a sudden change from the calm establishing shot to the panning shot of the struggle which follows me for a moment then stops as I’m dragged around the corner and finally the shot is an extreme close up of my hand holding my phone and as it starts to ring the shot pans out two relieve me dead on the floor of the toilet.
Our next scene took a bit more planning and preparation this was because it was off of the college site and was far away from college so we only had the one night to shoot the footage and I choice to try a very complex pool table scene where all the characters walk around the table while talking. So I needed to work with Cleve our cinematographer to make sure that all the characters are the right side of the screen and on the right side of the 180 degree line. We also have the task of asking all parents with children if they minded us filming because without consent we were unable to film, luckily everyone was agreeable to us filming.
There were many more shots in this scene I would say there were over twenty different shots we look at to get the best out of the location, I tried to make sure that each character got a close up of there face and I shot to show where they are in the room and it they move around the table that it is made clear they have moved to the audience. And the final scene of the backstreet was an easy one to shoot with just two shots the establishing shot of Mucker walking towards the camera which then switches to an over the should shot of a car and the other two gang member stood waiting for him.
So now that we had all our footage we start to edit it and this is Ed came in though we all did bit he did a majority of the editing and did a fine job of it. Now on the sound side of thinks our first idea was to completely rip the old sound off and create a new background and folly work etc. But then later on decided against this and left the speech on and added to the background. Out first problem with the editing was that we have missed a shot out so we had Alex or Joe coming up from a shot on the pool table but not one of him going down, so we fixed this me reversing the shot of Alex coming up to create Alex going down. But other than these few problems I fell that our film had been a great success.