Production

Planning for Production – Idea generation and brainstorming

This week we have been divided up into our coursework groups and have begun to explore possible themes, narratives and ideas for our film opening. So far, we are considering creating a film within the Thriller genre about digital piracy vs human exploitation during our brainstorming process it was really easy to communicate with my group members and generate ideas, one big advantage our group had was that each group members had really specific skill sets, for example I’m really good at the creative stuff such as drawing and thinking of the costumes. whilst the others had their skills that shows when we worked together during this project.

Planning for Production – roles and responsibilities.

Today in class within our groups we discussed and delegated some key roles and responsibilities as we prepare to produce our film opening. It was decided that I would be in charge of making the mood board, drawing the story boards, and deciding on the costumes. This is because I am good at more creative stuff as well as experiences from making the storyboards before in previous projects. My first step towards these jobs is to confirm our general plot summary as well as making sure what camera angles should be used before I have drawn the full plan of the story boards. Furthermore I need to check with my team members what kind of character they want to present before I decide on the costumes for each character, For example is the main character clusmy looking or does he look like a sophisticated man. To be successful I will need to check in with my teammates before I have done my tasks to keep them on track and prevent disagreements.

Production Process

As we get closer and closer to our filming week, we are focusing on the completion of our final storyboard, shot list, and production schedule. We have now finished our script and initial planning documents and are close to completing our storyboard and equipment checklist. As an individual, my next steps are to finalise my role in the group, get ready for acting, and finish refining the storyboard. We have decided that our first filming session will be next week after school, beginning with the indoor sequences, as these are easiest to control in terms of lighting and sound. Our biggest challenge so far has been communicating with each other because everyone in our group is more on the introverted side.

Fliming

In the film, I played the role of a news interviewer, which meant I got to wear a specific costume and deliver scripted lines to introduce the antagonist. During filming, however, I forgot to remove the gum I was chewing, which made my character appear unprofessional in a few shots. Fortunately, we were able to edit this out during post-production. I don’t believe we needed to reshoot anything, as our shots were well-planned from the start. We made sure to capture multiple takes of each scene from different angles to prevent issues like this from affecting the final product.

We filmed in several locations, including our school, Jackson’s house, the front of the Auckland Council building, and the Mitre 10 carpark in Albany. We began by filming the school scenes, which was convenient. All we needed was a dark space and a suit jacket over Zach’s school uniform. We chose the photography room and used a lunchtime to get those scenes done. For the scenes outside of school particularly those at the beginning of the film. We coordinated times to meet up after school and film at the agreed locations.

Rough Cuts Review

In class this week we were given the opportunity to perform some market research on our class as an audience. We showed key scenes from the film as separate clips in a rough edit and also explained our general plot/theme/characters to the audience.

As a grou, we decided we wanted feedback on clarity of the plot, pacing, audience engagement, and what they liked/disliked about the film opening because we needed to know if our narrative was easy to follow, if the pacing created the right tone, and whether our creative choices were effective for building interest in the story.

We created a Microsoft Form to gather this information on aspects such as clarity “Is there anything you didn’t understand?”, emotional impact “How did it make you feel?”, pacing, strengths and weaknesses, suggested changes, and overall rating.

Edits

Based on our feedback and our reflections, we have made the following changes: We re-ordered some of the clips to clarify the storyline, made the pace faster by cutting down slower moments, added dialogue and audio to create atmosphere, and refined camera angles and transitions to make the opening feel more refined.