Pre-Production: Preliminary Coursework

The brief for our preliminary coursework consisted of a very basic structure. we were given an outline for a story- two characters are involved, one walks through a door and they have about three or four lines of conversation. This gave my team and I a lot of room for our creativity to shine through, so Caitlin and I decided to recreate a stereotypical Film Noir or western. Unfortunately Evan wasn't available for the planning, script writing or story boarding of the practice film, but he was there for the shoot and editing, creating his now iconic role of Brandy Maxx. We decided to go for something different for our idea, instead of making the characters sit down and have a boring conversation, e attempted a parody of the classic Film Noir, with the detective, Harry Spaghetti and the femme fatal Brandy Maxx. We chose to do this parody of the Film Noir, as we also wanted to show our imagination, and that we put some thought behind what we are doing.

The actual shooting went well; we followed our storyboard and chose carefully what shots we wanted to include. Filming from different angles was fun if not a little tedious, but it gave us a little more of an idea of what it is like on a real film set, when we had to shoot the same sequence from about 5 different camera angles and go over the same script again and again. We didn't mind though, as it gave us a good idea of what we will be doing when we're on film sets in the future.
As i said before, everything went well, there weren't any problems with the shoot. everyone had their costumes, remembered their lines and the camera was working which was a brilliant bonus.

However we did lean a few things. In my opinion, I would have liked to have been there for the editing, as the sound and colouring could have been better. I would have also added a wider variety of camera angles, as we did shoot them but they weren't included in the final cut. But I'm more than happy on how it turned out, as this is just our practice task and it did get quite a few laughs, which is what we were aiming for. As for the things we learnt, we realised that sound and dialogue is very important within a film, and our dialogue carried our short (also the fact that Evan was dressed as a woman). So we will really concentrate on the sound and the effect we can create with the use of sound in our final piece.
Lauren.