In the first week of this project we focused on what out interests were; creating mood boards and writing about what our 4 main interests were. I found these tasks didn’t really help me come to a conclusion on the film I wanted to make to be honest. Although these interests were my own when I thought about the kinds of films I could make to do with them I couldn’t come up with anything. In the end I ended up planning a documentary about eSports, because it was about one of my interests and it was the only thing I could come up with. I ended up running into a lot of problems later on with this project having to scrap the entire thing after weeks of work. I think that pushing us to make a film about our interests didn’t really work well and I think if I had researched into other areas I could have had a much smoother process and done a better project.
It was difficult to know what to ask people when doing the primary research about our 4 interests, as interests can be quite broad and so the questions you come up with can be totally irrelevant to any film idea you come up with, however it was useful by seeing peoples reactions to the different interests and it was clear by how they reacted the interest they would have in a film to do with this interest. What I’ve learned from this is that I should have done more of a variation in my primary research as all I did was interviews. For future projects I’ll be sure to go out an take pictures and do further research.
We analysed the primary and secondary research that we did for our 4 interests and at this point it seemed that I was most interested in eSports and so I decided to make a documentary film about this. At the time I thought I could use a lot of stock footage, with a few interviews and green screen footage of me talking and narrating this project. Later on I was told that I would be using too much stock footage and so I had to change my production to doing a lot of pre-production instead of producing an actual film. The project proposal was then a disaster, as I didn’t really know what I was doing yet with the production pack. After it was fully explained the kind of work I would need to do for this project I realized that I wanted to actually make a film. In the future I need to take a step back whilst coming up with the ideas for my film and make sure that I actually want to create the project and to make sure I have the technical skills and budget to produce it. As doing this could have saved me a lot of time and trouble.
After this I did all of the pre-production for a new project which was a short film about an aspiring eSports player. After I spent a week or so doing all of this work I talked with my head of film and we came to the conclusion that the film I had planned I wouldn’t actually be able to produce. I was obviously really unhappy at the time, as I was going to have to redo the pre-production again.
Fortunately I was able to reuse a lot of the pre-production papers and so it didn’t take long to do it again. I learnt a lot from this and I think that next time I make a film I should have a hard think about the concept and make sure I can actually create it before doing all of the pre-production documents.
The production of my project went far smoother than the pre-production stage. The film that I produced was what I put down on the final project proposal that I created. There were quite a few audio problems including not having an actual shotgun mic like I had planned to use, no wind cover on the mic so we had to retrofit a t-shirt to be one, and still having wind noise in some situations. I learnt a lot about how to direct people and how to be in charge of a set. Which are valuable skills to have in the future for when I go into the media industry.
I created a daily diary for every day that I was filming and editing so that I could properly reflect and evaluate on how my production went. I wrote about the things that went well and the problems that I had.
The post-production process was quite a struggle. I was riddled with a huge amount of audio problems in which I spent the majority of my time editing sorting out. I should have tried to secure the equipment earlier on in the project to make sure that I had the equipment I needed on the day. Although I didn’t have this mic so I had to try and fix the audio as best I could by lowering the gain, changing the pitch, tempo and speed.
In my 4.1 blog post I did an evaluation on my production process. Once I had completed this I think that I appreciated my project more for what it was than how I felt about it before. I was initially a bit disappointed with it, but considering the process I went through to get to that point I’m quite content with how it came out. That’s not to say there aren’t things I would change as there most definitely are.
Finally I got some feedback from my class and teacher about my film, what was good about it and how I could improve it. I was happy about the feedback I got as it was mainly positive things, however there were a couple of story and audio based problems that came up that I was already aware of, and if I could redo it I would iron out these issues.
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