Main Task

By practicing how to use the camera, we will reduce the risk of delaying any processes we have in the future such as while we are filming, we wouldn’t have to stop for any mistake of lack of understanding (which may cause things to take longer than if we had learnt how to do it effectively at the start).

Here is a colleague of mine learning how to station a camera and its on-board features.

Once we familiarised ourself on how to use the camera, we started following the storyboard an shot list to film the short film,

This was our first draft:



After posting this first draft on the popular video sharing website "YouTube", we gained some feedback that we will use to decide which parts of the movie to edit or improve. The feedback came in the form of comments:

Our youtube feedback was not a successful way of getting constructive feedback so we decided to choose another method of gaining data, the other methods included questionnaires, a video or an interview (audio) with the people we consider to be our target audience (ages 13 - 21, excluding short film enthusiasts). We decided that at the time, the easiest method to use effectively was by interviewing people who have watched our first draft:




Mid Production Vlog

Inspiration for Ideas

Direct Link to "Tedpod" Show with Sting

In this radio show hosted by TED, Guy Raz talks about how the mind becoms creative, processes crativity and what we do with it. Paticularly, Guy asks the musician Sting about how he eventually got over his writers block. <1:30 - 3:40>.

What I find particularly interesting is how Sting say's that your creativity mostly depends on your childhood, and his childhood were spent in the quiet city of Wallsend, sitting with his father in the van whilt delivering milk, dreaming as much as he can. He was able to convert that creativity he had gained from all that dreaming into the famous classic-rock music tracks. But it is what he did (or dreamt of in this case), that I want to understand, since It would be the dreaming that might have made him decide to write and sing classic-rock song as opposed to say, pop songs or hip-hop. Understanding this, would allow me to understand why people like certain genres, and potentially, how to get them to like other genres.

My Idea
Unlike Sting, I did not use my history as inspiration, however, my creativity did have a part in it. At the start, I planned that the film I would take part in must have a puzzling aspect to it, this is because att he time, I was immersing myself with puzzling films (joint with horror), whatching films such as Exam (2009) and Would You Rather (2012), films that make the mind think and wonder and leave you excited and tense.

It would be hard to add a complex puzzle in a short film sure tot he short duration, however,  many short films have had a mind-twisting plot, in particular the animated The Backwater Gospel. However, I did not want to add such a sinse of horror in my short film like how all these others seem to do, so I decided to use the familiar setting of my school at daytime, which makes the environment seem more friendly.

The process taken to decide on the actual plot was made as a team, the idea was a result of collaboration. The plot incolving two individuals searching for each other in a single campus, yet always ending in the opposite sides of the campus (and how they got there) added that puzzling aspect that I wanted.

This was our second draft:


After this draft, we had changed our filming group, the new group changed from Patrice Ashy, Ali Hakimy, Patryk Kulas and Elle Gilbert to Patrice Ashby, Ali Hakimy and Ravey Pambu.

So we created a draft using our new idea:



Which we then also got feedback using YouTube's comment section:

We applied the feedback and created another draft:



Feedback given using YouTube's comment section:

Points taken from this feedback:

1. Reduce the walking scenes' length, perhaps remove some of them of cut out bits from them.

2. Build up the plot from the beginning by showing the audience the antagonist, but keeping it hidden from the antagonist. This may make the beginning scenes more interesting and fun to watch and tension is slowly being built from the start.

3. Overall try to add elements of excitement and mystery to keep the audience interested.

After applying the feedback, we created our final: