1000 word evaluation

Introduction

As I understood it, there were two main aims for this project, the first was to create a photograph and a short film haven taken inspiration from a painting and the second was to really discover and realise what area of creative media you want to specialise in by working through the different rotations. With inspiration from Edward Hopper’s painting Morning Sun, I set out to create a photograph and short film with a dark theme that looks into the loneliness in humanity. The subject of both the film and photograph was loneliness because it is the subject of the painting.

Research

Even though research was timetabled for only one week, throughout all the other weeks I found myself constantly researching about this and that and finding more things to look into to enhance my work and my project. I always seemed to find something to investigate. The first thing thing I started to research about was the painting and I felt very comfortable with completing these tasks. I started to find a little difficulty when it came to thinking about my own photograph because it was not easy to try and see which were actually good ideas and which would be interesting to do. I really enjoyed researching and writing but had to remember to do some important things like proper referencing and considering the bigger picture. I also researched the topic of loneliness, improving on the feeling and creating awareness. I was also able to use different ways of presenting my research, like mind maps, instead of just the way I usually do.

For the masks I took some inspiration from ancient Roman theatre but I did not do research about it during this project but I had learnt about them before, I thought that the masks added a nice mood for the image I wanted to create.

Planning

Planning came up almost every week and really helped work out everything I needed to do and distribute my time effectively. I always tried to create lists and plans of things that I needed to do and get. When planning I had to consider what type of filming equipment to use as I had a few options, but I decided to use my own camera as it was the option that was the easiest and had the best quality. Even after making all the plans, I didn’t always feel prepared enough when setting up and trying to get everything ready but writing up the plans was still very helpful. I had already learnt about narrative before, and looking back at other stories I had written in a similar context, it seemed that I preferred to create linear narrative stories with ambiguous and mysterious story lines, though I suppose that is the easiest types of stories to come up with. I seemed to also prefer taking ordinary people and putting them in seemingly supernatural situations, I usually go for this type of storytelling. After storyboarding my idea, I did not feel happy with the simplicity of it; the lack of a good individual idea. Still, I found the storyboarding fun and even though I could only draw stick men, I think that it was still a good one.

Filming & Editing

I think that the next time I do a dark theme I should film it in light and then edit it to be darker for more flexibility because I think that I made the film a little too dark without realising. Filming itself was quite short and sweet. I didn’t have to worry about sound because the actors were supposed to be silent and as there was a minimalism theme, there weren’t too many props and costumes that needed to be worried about. The location was in my house because I feel like that idea that we can be lonely anywhere still rings true today, it is especially relevant this year. The masks didn’t really have too much symbolism. I was able to experiment with phone filming and I was able to see some benefit. I was able to see that it was faster, easier in terms of settings and setting up would be nearly nothing, however I didn’t think it was for me or my work, this was especially because my phone quality wasn’t very good even though it was actually better than I had previously thought it was. The actors did great and everything was shot fairly swiftly, there was no need for multiple takes. They portrayed the characters that I had wanted very well so I didn’t work too much on filming. Editing was not hard to do and only took one day to finish. I usually struggle with editing but because I had planned everything beforehand I knew what I had to. I used royalty free music for the film and before editing I wrote scripts for voice-overs and then I recorded them. On the side I also edited some prototype posters but I didn’t use them in their raw form because I didn’t think they fitted the theme properly but I changed them and made one of them into a poster that I ended up using during the promotion week.

Presentation

By presentation I am specifically talking about promotion and promotion material. I found that thinking about and planning the presentation of my film was very fun. It wasn’t something I had really done before. A lot things were new to me but I tried to learn about them, like an EPK for example, before this project I had never heard about it but during the marketing week it was the first thing I thought about and did because I believed it was an essential thing to have for my film. I made a lot new things to go with the short film during this week, I made posters, a website, trailers and fake virtual magazines. A lot of the things were from templates but one day I hope that I can make things like that without templates. I think the trailers went pretty well, of course there are places for improvement but they were still pretty good. Because my film is so short I made adjustments to some things, for example, the synopsis became 50 words as opposed to the usual 100 words and the trailers were a lot shorter as well. I liked designing the website and I think it came out well.

Conclusion

Through this project I found that I am good at researching but I need to challenge myself to become better editing and filming, this will be very beneficial for next projects. I also found that constant planning helps everything run more smoothly. I think the only things that I am good at are writing and research but I'm here to challenge myself and I believe that that is what I'm doing and feeling demoralised when doing something you aren't used to is normal. I should have spent more time on the film but it was a good try, everything seemed a bit messy probably because it was slightly rushed. All these things to seem to further push the narrative that I am not cut out for Creative Media but I will see where it all goes.