Film evaluation

Film Evaluation

When producing our film, ‘Last Period’ we aimed to create a dramatic film about teenage life. We took our main inspiration from the romance between Renton and Diane in the film ‘Trainspotting’. The beginning of the planning of our film was a struggle as we all knew that we wanted it to be social realism however it took a while for us to think of an idea that would be interesting but not too difficult to film within the time frame we were set. As a group we worked well together as we get on very well and we know how to work with each other due to the fact that we were grouped together to create our first film for this course. From filming a horror film last time, we knew that we did not want to do the same again as filming at night made it difficult for us to all meet up due to some members of our group living outside of Nuneaton. Filming in the day meant that we could use time in lesson and after college. We also met on a Sunday afternoon in order to film the shots in a family member’s house, which we didn’t end up including in the final cut of our film. We worked together on all aspects of this film and thoroughly enjoyed writing the screenplay as it gave us a chance to create a vision of what we wanted the film to look like before we went out to film. This meant that any ideas one of us wanted to discuss with the group could be put forward early rather than leaving it until the last minute when we went out to film. As the screenplay was only two pages long, we also created a list of the places we knew we wanted to shoot and what scene of the film we wanted to shoot there. This gave us a huge advantage when we went out to start filming, reduced the stress on the two days we were out as well as making us work through things more efficiently as it meant we could shoot in the places that were close to each other so we got it filmed quickly.

Similarly to last time we created a film, we found actors but they all dropped out of it last minute meaning that two members of our group to have to step in. I believe that this made certain things more difficult as I had to film on a camera which I had never used before however harry taught me the basics and the shots didn’t end up looking too bad, even though I thought I was recording when I wasn’t meaning that we had to re film a scene that we were missing. However, not having to direct actors meant that we could get the scenes exactly how we wanted them as we didn’t have to explain our ideas to anyone else. Overall when we were out filming it went quite smoothly however due to the town centre being busy in the day we had to record the same scene several times in order to get the audio clear enough. As most of our dialogue was improvised we didn’t have to waste time learning lines and the interaction between characters seemed more natural. The camerawork was quite shaky as I had never used a camera like that before however it wasn’t too much of an issue as it added to the social realism feel of the film.

Editing the film was fairly simple as we knew what order the shots needed to go and which ones we needed to cut. However, the audio of the two phone calls, which gave the exposition for our film, was not as clear as we needed it to be. This meant that we had to spend most of our editing time adding subtitles which took a long time. I was unsure about this at first as I thought that it may make the film look silly however I think it added a humorous aspect to the film which I personally really liked. We also had some issues importing the shots that we filmed on Charmaine’s phone when the camera ran out of battery but we quickly overcame this by re filming it quickly in one of the lessons that we were going to use to edit. Using this time didn’t impact us too much as me and Harry had a free together on a Thursday afternoon which we used to finish the editing and make the film as good as we could.