Execution and evaluation

Evaluation

I feel that the strength of our project was the preproduction and planning as we did extensive research on the topic and location before even going on our first test shoot. Even with this research we still ran into complications in terms of making the story long enough, but this particular problem was based on the fact that we didn’t have enough actor too fill the 2 roles that were in the original storyboard. Another aspect of the film that I felt was particularly effective was the use of the colour red in the form of the dress. I think technically it was good because it helped make the actor stand out from the dark background allowing us to film in low light but also on a story note it portrayed a sexual and energetic character without us having having to show her attending a party and giving context to the audience.

We faced the most problems during production due to the low light setting. The first problem was finding the right time to film where it was light enough to see details and for the camera quality to look its best, too early and it would look like midday but too late and the only thing you could see was the red dress. To pinpoint the right time we shot 3 times before doing our fourth and final shoot at the time we determined walked best for us. Another problem was using our artificial LED lights without making it look obvious that there was concentrated light on the actor. To minimise this issue we tried to utilise street lights and daylight to mask/ enhance the studio lighting. Another problem with the final result is that the sound is really quiet and can barely be heard when put on large speakers. We could have combat this by checking the volume in compliance with the volume indicators in the editing software to make sure it is up to industry standard volume, this is something to remember for future projects. One big thing that would’ve helped in production was having more people working with us. Due to me having to fill in for an absent actor and our runner cancelling on us the day of the shoot we only had 2 people to hold the camera, light, light diffuser and light reflector. Unfortunately due to these setbacks we did not achieve the finished look that we wanted which was best represented in our main inspiration film 2AM. We tried to replicate several shots and the atmosphere but the level of quality was not there in the same way it was in the original thriller short film due to our struggles with filming in low light as described above.