Preliminary Feedback

Preliminary Task Evaluation

Our film represents social groups in a negative way. Specifically, in a devious and criminal way. The two teenagers in the film are planning to carry out a murder, it could be argued that these characters are conforming to the negative, ignorant stereotype of a lot of young people being reckless criminals or 'thugs'. The female character, acted by myself is  the antagonist, she is strong minded and determined, getting frustrated as time goes on. The male character, the mentally weaker and less strong-willed of the two is the protagonist, acted by Gabriel Hayden. This goes against the stereotypical gender roles consistently shown in films. The norm would be the male being the antagonist and the female the assistant, being the physically and mentally weaker of the two, often resulting in the male antagonist having to 'save' them. We are exposed to this set up all the time in the film industry. Multiple examples in classic films such as the James Bond films, Spider Man, Harry Potter and so forth. Our film opposes this by the female character giving commands and directions to the male assistant, and in fact, indirectly ordering them to carry out the murder.  We created the negative image of these two teenagers through numerous factors. Firstly, our use of costume; both characters are wearing baggy shapeless clothes, showing they are attempting to hide something from the public spectators. The male character acted by Gabriel is dressed in darker clothes than the female character. This is symbolic of the fact that he has to take part in darker and more serious activities; as he has to actually commit the murder. Therefore,he is at higher risk of potentially being caught, hence having to be less noticeable and having more to hide. Another way we created this image of deviance is the locations we shot our film in. As shown below, we never shot in open, hectic locations. All shooting locations were 'hidden', if you will in the city, such as alleyways and underpasses. We chose these locations as they went with the mysterious theme of the film. Not only because of the literal visual and atmosphere created but also the lighting that an alley way physically creates on a subject; close, thin walls creating shadows both on the location and a character, aiding the effect we wanted to create.Furthermore, alleys have strong connotations of mystery, crime and the unknown...

In addition, to attract our audience we chose interesting location choices, that aided the gritty theme of the film and a varied use of camera shots making the film more aesthetically pleasing and interesting to watch. In terms of the plot, as a group we decided to add a comedic element and twist to a very originally dark story line. This was done in subtle ways such as our use of contrapuntal sound in the soundtrack we used.  As sound editor Marvin M. Kerner says, one of the functions of sound is creating mood. If you watched our film without any sound, the humorous, mischievous element would not be apparent. Therefore, re-instating the fact that sound creates the mood of a film. As the male character responds to the orders from the female character he begins to walk away and as he does so, flings the bag she has given him away. This is ironic because it is supposedly full of dangerous weapons. As he walks away, we have a up-beat song playing, portraying the character as carefree and bubbly, showing he was never actually passionate or serious about the murder plan. The use of contrapuntal sound dictates the whole illusion and mood of the plot and film, as an audience member it would contrast my original thoughts towards the film and perhaps make me enjoy it more due to the light hearted twist and relief from the heaviness of the original plot.

In terms of technology, the main problem we faced was underestimating the quality of the sound that was available on my DSLR camera alone. Throughout our film the quality of sound is poor, due to background noise of traffic and just from relying on the DSLR's audio. It made the dialogue extremely brittle and minuscule. Unfortunately, we only came to realise the severity of this problem when it came to editing the shots rather than when we were playing them back whilst shooting. I believe this is because we were overly focused on getting the perfect shot in terms of visuals and when doing this it is easy to forget about other aspects of the film. This landed us in a difficult position of having to 'make do' with the content we had. Next time we will use separate audio equipment to enhance the sound quality. We overcame these issues by using the editing software to its advantage; we used a tool attempting to minimize the background noise but unfortunately it didn't work as well as we'd hoped.

I think the strengths of our film production is the range of shot types and camera angles we used. I feel they were varied, creative and experimental. These are, in my opinion, the best shots:

This wide high angled shot was used as our establishing shot.
The use of a point of view camera angle helps relate to what the public and
 spectators could see. Furthermore, the high angled shot makes
Gabriel appear inferior. I like this shot because of the use of manual focusing
on the character.

This eye level angled mid shot show the both the characters
in one shot. For me, the juxtaposing personalities
of the two characters are shown. Although this wasn't intentional,
my character is against a darker, more shadowed background
with bolder graffiti,connotating the serious attitude towards the plot.
Gabriel's character is against a lighter 'airy' background,connotating
the flakey,nonchalant views he has on the situation.

I like this shot because it portrays Gabriel's characters mischievous
and carefree mindset towards the supposedly serious scenario.
As this shot is prior to the 'climax' of the film, it foreshadows what
is yet to come from this character...



Again, I feel the weaknesses of this film is the use of sound and the quality of it. I really feel that it contributes to the overall quality of the film and in this case the sound deprecated the quality of the film. Secondly, I would have made the plot clearer to the audience, as I feel it was unclear and overly open to interpretation, therefore this would improve the quality of my work. The mind map of initial ideas and the use of story boarding made the actual shooting a lot more organised and efficient, as we had a rough plan we could stick to and change if needed. Having a rough guideline allowed us to be more creative and experimental while shooting as we could vary shot types from what we had planned, for example. I feel additional planning that would've aided us could have been experimenting with shot types alone to furthermore aid our visual choices and planning prior to the filming.

The 180 degree rule the 180-degree rule is a 'basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object within a scene' (1). This rule is important to filming tasks because of visually keeping the film balanced, we managed to do this within our film.

To edit our preliminary film we used the apple programme iMovie. I feel extremely confident using this programme. Specifically, when it comes to cutting clips and music to match, after creating the rough cut. I also feel confident in editing the content visually, more specifically; changing the colours and tones of specific shots.


SOURCES: (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/180-degree_rule 

Preliminary Task