Completed short film

Reflecting back on my short film and I was looking back on the positive and negative things about it. Being disappointed with the first edit of our film whilst editing for the second time we focussed on making it as good as possible and I am going to talk about the things in our short film that made it work well. I particularly think that the way some of the shots have been put together work really well, for example the shot in the bathroom where she is turning the bath taps. There are also a few other shots in our short film which I felt made it more visually interesting and reflected on some of the short films I have watched. However, I think we should have thought about the shots more whilst filming because then we would have more of these really good shots. It was a shame because we also had some other good shots but couldn’t use them and they did not work well with narrative, we should have planned this better. The use of still imagery works well I feel it gives the audience more of an understanding to what the film is about and gives an idea of where this girl gets her obsession from. The still imagery also makes the short have more of a “girly” feel to it. Not only did the still imagery make our piece more attractive but the way we edited them into our piece worked well and the way they are cut fast goes with the whole feel of our film as it is all edited fast. We didn’t spend ages searching for music to go underneath our piece we only looked through a few CD’s. Luckily we found a song quite quickly that I think worked really well under our piece especially with the poem. I think that the poem over the top makes our piece and I think that without this our film would be a lot less interesting and nobody would know what was going on. The female we used in our short film was well suited to the role and the style of the film and we were luckily to find someone so well suited.

Although there were some good things about our short film we was still left feeling disappointed in ourselves but we felt as if we couldn’t do anything else to improve and a number of times felt like giving up. The things that didn’t work well were that it was too short. It was too short in the sense that we didn’t explain enough in that minute and we could have had more shots. I think this is the thing that really let our film down as it could have been a lot better if we had more footage and explained the story in a little more depth. Some of our shots were out of focus and some of them were so badly out of focus that we couldn’t use them (making our film even shorter). If we extended the poem then maybe we could have used more shots and it could have been improved but we felt like we had a lot of improving to do in a small space of time but did our best to improve what we could.

Our film conforms to the codes and conventions of short film. Short film is a genre in its own defined by its running time (has to be under 50 minutes long or micro short under 5 minutes) our film was a micro short and its running time was under 5 minutes long. Our film was low budget as we didn’t spend hardly anything on making it. However, a code and convention of short film is that because it is short it has to draw in the audience quickly but I do not feel as if our short film does this. Our film holds a message which short film usually does but it could be more thought provoking.

I felt that I held a large part in the production of our short film. I felt that I played a large part in the narrative and the planning of our short film as me and my group member are alike so each others ideas would always work together to make something better. The production work of our short film was shared our fairly but we both wrote the script together so we both had involvement into what went into our story (we had to do two lots of production work as we changed our short film). On both times we filmed I was present and we shared our filming and set preparation so someone always had something to do. I did my share of editing which made me feel good as in past projects i haven’t been given the opportunity to use my skills as the editing desk as much as i would have liked to. I felt as if I could have played a larger role in researching about our film such as I could have found still imagery and made collages as well.