That's a Wrap!

Yes production is finally complete of our short film "Post It!", after a gruelling 11 hour day on wednesday we completed the project and handed it in on thursday. Its been a tough week and we all worked very hard to get the job done on time. I am happy with the finished article and cannot wait to see it on the big screen! I think now is a good time for reflection on the whole process of making a film, in the past 7 weeks weve taken an initial idea and seen it evolve into a finished film, its been a great learning experience and ive had a lot of fun.

Looking back we got off to a slow start and initially struggled with the group process, meetings were few and far between for the first couple of weeks and in hindsight i beleive we paid the price for this as the deadline drew closer. From the time we came up with the idea to the time of our first presentation we didnt put enough effort into research and preparation, hence most of the things we did from there on were done off the top of our heads as we went along. This approach lead to a somewhat disorganised feel although it must be said we improved as we went along and by the end were all working very well as a team. I feel we should have carefully considered some of the potential problems that could, and did, arise. For example the office scenes, we thought at first we were going to shoot in the staff office and didnt plan any alternatives. This meant when we had to shoot in the studio and create our own office from scratch we had no designs to go off and hadnt put any thought into the lighting required in a studio setting which lead to some footage being un-useable which in the real world would be a complete waste of peoples time and money. In the future i beleive that pre production needs to be completed as thoroughly as possible to allow production and post production to run smoothly.
When it came to filming this was something i had very limited experience of and i have had to learn a lot in a short space of time to get up to the same speed as my group members. I feel i did well in this area and this is proven by some of the shots i filmed being in my opinion the best in the film. I enjoy working with a camera and at the moment its definetly something i want to do more of as the course progresses.

Finally we reached the stage of post production, we probably didnt give ourselves enough time on this as we should have and if it wasnt for the fact that Paul was experienced with Premiere we may not have got the job done in time. I learned a lot about editing through observing Paul and Will and the techniques they were using, i also had a go at editing a few scenes myself and as a result my understanding of this process has grown massively. I think the best way to learn is to just have a go and pick things up as you go which is what i did. The most annoying thing about this was that we had 4 of us around one computer all suggesting different ideas for how the shots should be cut. Each one of us wanted our own ideas to be input and in a way thats good because it shows we all cared about the finished product but in hindsight it may have been better to just have a meeting before the edit and discuss what direction we wanted to go in then just leave 1 or 2 people to get on with it. This would have been a far more efficent method and is something i will consider in the future.

So thats just a brief run through of the main things i learned from this module, i will now set about the task of writing my report. I havent had to do any writing like this for nearly 3 years so its a bit of a daunting prospect now but i have plenty of things to say and once i'm going i'll be fine.

I'm working on reducing the file size of our film so i can display it on here, so check back soon to see the finished version of "Post It!"


Farewell and Have a Nice Day


David Walker