The process of a 1 minute film.

Before the summer we were set a task of completing a 1 minute length film. Me and a group of friends decided to do a film based on a 'day in the life of'. To make it into its simplest form we decided to choose a member of the group to base the film around. When brainstorming our ideas we found that we could make it much more comical by doing a film on 'reality Vs fantasy'.

By this we meant filming to different versions of how the main character Avi thinks she sees her life and how it actually is. An example would be.. 'Avi walks down the corridor and Mr Edwards winks and says 'Hey Avi looking good' When a reality shot would be 'Avi walks down the corridor and Mr Edwards barges by her'.

Our group thought this would make an excellent one minute film because firstly, the clips we had in mind were easy to film and set out in a way that would make the audience laugh. By having a couple of ideas we were able to fill up the One minute time gap. Secondly by using a member of the group to film, we all felt comfortable telling each other what would look good and what wouldn't. Avi knew as well as me and Chelsea what the final one minute film would look like therefore she was able to work with that in mind. Also it reduced any complications with getting other talent to be in our film. Similarly by using each other in the films rather than animals it meant the communication was better therefore making a more fluent film.

I created a storyboard which clearly identified all the various scenes that were going to be included in my 1 minute film as well as the camera angles that were going to be manipulated. These included:

• Start of the day (waking up)                                      
• Daily activities
• Direct comparisons of reality and fantasy  

• Close ups 
• Panning shots 
• Worms eye shots 
• Various zooms 
• HA (high angle shots)

As a group we found the filming easy compared to the editing. Editing was a challenge because final cut pro was not so simple to use. The software we used was something I had used only once before which made it much more challenging. Not only this but it was very slow and couldn't load our footage quickly which was my greatest complication as this made quick tasks become very time consuming. However after time I got to grips with all of the various effects and understanding the software, it was definitely something that I am happy that I experienced and I now feel comfortable editing on this software in the future. I used the camera angles that I not only felt were appropriate for the context of the short film but also what I felt was achievable from a regular camera.

 

However although our plans for filming were very straightforward, not everything went as smoothly as we anticipated. We faced many equipment errors in the process of filming as the camera that myself and my group and filmed on was not compatible with the new Apple Mac software that we needed to edit the footage on. Therefore we lost the original scenes that we had filmed and lost some editing time, to meet the deadline. Luckily, our first scenes were filmed right away and we noticed the issue in time. Therefore we were able to re-film some scenes and were able to raise them to a better standard than we had hoped, which was a positive outcome from this camera error.