Initially the group had issues with coming up with an idea, we were sort of half and half with making an ad for the course and an ad about a cause. However we ended up choosing the path of creating an ad for the course, and then this caused further problems with coming up with an idea as whilst we were brainstorming a few unrealistic ideas came up. After choosing the final base of the idea, which was having someone escape a jail cell into a creative world, we had a few discussions of what we could and couldn’t do within the piece and I thought this was quite helpful because it meant we could avoid an unrealistic goal at the end of the project.
Once the idea and plot had been discussed and decided within the group we were each assigned roles within preproduction by Laura who had taken on being Producer, but we weren’t the greatest group on being decisive which meant Laura was stressed out trying to figure out the roles for people and get the work back from them on time. Initially I was put as creating the risk assessment which I find easy to do, mainly because I see the risk in everything which makes a very detailed risk assessment. But soon enough the pressure of the project began to become a heavy weight on Laura's shoulder so I offered to become the assistant Producer to take some of the pressure off and help her out, I feel I tried my best within this role and attempted to keep the group structured but because I was chucked into the role without research I could have done a lot more than I did. Also communication was lacking within our group, unfortunately there were some people who were difficult to get hold of and never turned up to meetings or builds which caused more issues for myself and Laura, including wondering if they were actually going to turn up to the filming days or not along with knowing their roles. I felt this was very unprofessional and had to end up giving an ultimatum to the group mainly targeted towards the people who never turned up, this was saying if they didn’t help with the build they could turn up to the filming and although it sounds harsh it is more leeway than would be given at a real job.
Myself and Leanna were in charge of casting for the film which was definitely a new and interesting experience, we even booked out an office within Guildford for the actors to come to and audition which made it feel a lot more professional. We put up an advert describing what we wanted and managed to get some really good actors come to audition for it, we even had interest from a couple of actors that had been on shows from our childhood. I don’t believe too much went wrong with auditions because we came out with an amazing actor that did the role perfectly, and the only thing I would change would be creating a small script for them to practice on that was more to do with the ad. However we worked around this and found a script that would help see the actor portraying emotion on because that was what our ad was mainly based around.
The build itself was half stressful and half fun, this was because we got to do hands on creative work but the pressure of getting an entire set done in a day was horrific. I offered up the idea of getting one of the walls done whilst the other group was building their set, this is because then we would have less to do on the only day we had to build our entire set, and it could be easily moved around the studio. Also this meant we could test out our hole in the wall, which ended up with being a layer of thin polystyrene, a layer of paper, and the garden green brick things that were painted like bricks. Surprisingly this actually worked really well and created a great effect, and after all the effort to paint the bricks they looked incredible and realistic. If anything could have been done I would have preferred to have longer to create the set, and actually be able to be on the set to do a run through of the shots plus be able to test lighting. However because we only had the one day we had to do the best we could, which meant we weren’t as prepared as we could have been when it came to the shoot.
Within the shoot itself unfortunately I didn’t always stick to my role as Cinematographer, this was because some people within our group didn’t know their job role and didn’t stick to it. This resulted in myself and Laura doing a variety of roles throughout the shoot which weren’t the ones we were initially meant to do. I ended up doing quite a bit of the directing along with being the cinematographer which was not what I intended to do, however after the lunch break of the first shooting day I told myself just to stick to being the cinematographer. Once I made this decision I stuck with that job role and did it to the best of my ability, and looking at the shots afterwards I’m quite proud of how some of the results came out. If I could change anything though I would make sure we had to more time to rehearse as a group before, this would have also meant we would have learnt our job roles better. Also I will admit to getting a bit stressed at one point during the shoot and would like to apologise to Anne because I think I might have snapped at her, this was because although I was instructing the lighting team to do one thing they were doing another which wasted time and effort. However once this lighting issue was sorted out and we pursued further into it, we actually created an amazing shot of the main character crawling through the wall.
Within post production I had the job of doing the colour correction, I opted to do this job because my research into cinematography informed me that the cinematographer had a big role within colour correction which makes sense. I’ve done colour correction before and I find it really simple to do, however our lighting was horrendous and changed pretty much every scene and even at one point was incredibly bright which took a lot of editing. I would definitely take that into the next project and keep an eye on the lighting to make editing easier, the reason it went wrong this time was that one of our lighting team kept moving the lights around when instructed not to. The colour correction itself didn’t take me long at all and with instructions from Laura to make it kind of grey I managed to get that done, however I might go back to the colour correction again and change it a little bit to make the ad pop a little more.
Overall I feel the piece came out well even though we all had our doubts about it, we managed to create an ad that shows escaping and shows off our course work, plus it has some amazing shots within it. If I had to change things about the experience and the piece it would definitely be making sure everyone sticks to and knows their role on the set and in preproduction, I think if this was done correctly we could have done more shots to a higher level of standard. Also we forgot to record onto the blade on the first day, so I would make sure that we are all knowledgeable of the equipment and making sure we are using all thats available so recording onto the blade next time.
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