Preliminary Task

We were set a preliminary task in short groups to practice, and demonstrate, our existing film and video skills. The preliminary task had a short brief:

-A character opening a door

-They cross the room and sit in a chair opposite another character

-They exchange a couple of lines of dialogue

I am Married from BDC on Vimeo.

As a group, we were expected to expand on the brief and film a creative short film. On the day we were meant to start filming, I was absent from class due to a university open day at Glamorgan University, which was a full day event. This caused problems as there were only two other people in my group which made it difficult to do a lot.

When I came in for the next lesson, which was editing, we realised that they had shot a lot of things out of focus, and another group member was absent. Despite this, we managed to put together an acceptable looking film with what we had.

Come next lesson, we were going to finish what we had started. We logged on and opened up the project to find that all of our shots had disappeared. We spent the first 20 minutes or so of the lesson trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

In the end, we found out that on the day I wasn’t there, somebody had logged and captured the shots and saved them into the wrong folder. That folder had then been deleted because it wasn’t needed anymore, leaving us with absolutely no files. To make it worse, the group member who had the tape wasn’t in school.

Luckily, another group offered to let us use their tape to work with their footage. By then, all of the group members were in so we really had to work as a team. We managed, by the end of that lesson, to produce a piece of work that was fairly visually pleasing. As each member of our group had different abilities, we were able to show off all of our Final Cut Pro knowledge. We used cross fades to show the passing of time, if there wasn’t the right footage for what we wanted, as it wasn’t actually our footage. We took inspiration from stop frame animation to cut out small chunks of the tracking shot after the man walks out of the lift. We did this because we felt that the shot went on for too long and we thought this would be an effective way of doing it differently.

After we’d edited the footage to how we wanted it to be, we had to decide on a title. We were going to call it ‘Despicable’ as the character exclaims this towards the end, but we decided against it because it had nothing to really do with the film itself. In the end we went with ‘I Am Married’, because the male character in the film says it at one point. This is a statement that will let the audience know that the film is about a married man.

The way we chose to have the title show up on screen initially is like a typewriter/computer. I don’t think there was really a reason for this other than we like how it looked. The font, however, was chosen because we think it portrays the male character somehow. He has a very strong accent, and as the font has unnecessarily long spaces between the letters, we felt this could portray it. I’m not sure if other people will think the same, but that is the reason we have for it. After this we were going to put a black and white map of Africa behind the title, but we didn’t have enough time for it.

We were also going to add in an African music bed from Soundtrack Pro but we kept lowering the volume levels in the wrong places and ended up with not enough time left in the lesson.

I thought we’d done very well despite the problems and mistakes we’d had, and I couldn’t wait to watch it online when it got uploaded to Vimeo. When I watched it, I was really disappointed because the movement looked very jumpy, the cross fades didn’t seem as though they were in the right places, and the sound cut out somewhere in the middle of the film. I’m not sure what caused this, but it might have been the rushing around at the end of the lesson.

All in all, it was a good opportunity and we realised that we actually do have to work as a team, and try not to let each other down. This is something I will implement in the production of my final piece in hopes of a really great outcome.