Evaluation.

During these two terms of investigating artists, companies and organisations that produce, promote and screen short film I was able to plan and produce my own productions in a group, using a blog as a way of communicating all my work completed for this unit to date.

Completed short film:

After putting hard work in to our planning, shooting and editing when reflecting back on our finished Short film all efforts we put in seem to have paid off. I feel that because we originally had a good idea that our final piece turned out to be just as good as we’d hoped. Like anything our piece has its strengths and weaknesses but I feel that unlike any other project I’ve done or been involved in this piece defiantly have more strengths than weaknesses. After watching it back there weren’t many weaknesses but one or two of them being some cutting and cross fading of the music and some more different camera shots in one scene. The scene shown above is the scene I’d have like more different shots of. Other then these minor trip ups I feel our short film is one of the best products we’ve produced since starting at the BRIT school. I feel that it is one of our best projects because we worked well together in a group and there wasn’t much that we disagreed on.

Audiences:

As discovered in previous posts, short films aren’t for mainstream audiences and therefore only target small audiences. The tale of the lady and the cake would interest a target audience for people who are interested in silent film and possibly dogs and food. Our film abides by the code and conventions of the duration. More obvious codes and conventions would be the fact that it’s a silent old film which has music instead of dialogue. Another code and convention would be the pace, as it’s all sped up to make the acting seem more exaggerated. Many silent films are in black and white due to the lack of technology in the past but we were able to still keep colour but give it a 1950s TV grainy effect which I feel worked very well because it made it more original and different to other silent films. We hoped our film would be very upbeat, quirky and colourful which would give off a positive and happy mood and I feel we achieved this and the use of music helped us to achieve this because its upbeat and old fashioned and adds to the happy atmosphere.

Influences:

The lady and the cake is an original idea that we thought of during inspiration week. It originally came from a poem called ‘infidelities’ written by Moyra Donaldson. We thought of a idea about a lady and a cake and then after thinking about how to make it more comical we changed the ending to the one that we have. Inspiration week was a great idea and our idea spiralled off from here. When we read back the poem we realised that our film doesn’t really relate to our story at all but the whole idea of being able to make a film about anything you wanted allowed us to change almost everything about our original idea from the poem which was about a woman who woke up and run to the shop with lots of loose change to buy cakes and her husband catches her. Our story is still very similar but we scrapped the loose change idea because we felt this idea would be more comical and would convey the whole lifestyle of husband and wife in the 1950’s more. We wanted to portray the wife as being a typical 1950s housewife, doing housework, cleaning whilst her husbands goes to work and earns the money. As we weren’t at an advantage of having a 1950s environment we thought we could use everything as 1950s except for where it was set which is more modern, this idea worked extremely well.
Charlie Chaplin was defiantly our biggest influence through the whole idea of a silent, fast paced, comical short film. Another short film that influenced us was ‘tour Eiffel’ by Sylvain Chomet from the Paris je t’aime collection. This short film influenced us because it made us happy and smile and whilst it seemed very pointless and didn’t make a lot of sense it still made us feel happy and this was the effect we wanted to have on our audience. Opposed to lots of hidden meanings we just wanted a happy light hearted narrative.
Another influence was Nigella Lawson, her idea of a ‘domestic goddess’ played an important part in our narrative because the idea of being a good cook and cleaner and the perfect women contributed to being a perfect housewife.

Distribution

We would like to distribute our film through video sharing websites which gives anyone the chance to search their interests and watch our film. Tags for our film on Vimeo.com includes cake, food, silent film, happy, this means that if someone types any of them tags into the search box then our film will come up on one of the pages. We would also like to enter it into competitions such as the London short film festival which is a local short film festival which holds their nominees for the best short film at various different venues across London. This would be a great way to show other young film makers our film and maybe inspire them.

Feedback

To receive feedback about our short film we were given the opportunity to present our short films to a class of year 12s and to hand out our own made questionnaires to hear any thoughts and comments. As the Year 12s have not yet studied short film it wasn’t likely that they knew much about them. In our questionnaire we tried to ask questions that could give us as much feedback as possible and as we had to do this for the year 13s when we was in year 12 we didn’t want to bore them and make them do lots of writing. We tried to make our questionnaire a mixture of multiple choice and yes or no answers and sentenced answers. When asked what worked the least in our short film the majority of the class said the music and the contrast between modern and 1950s as some of the music was badly edited and our film was meant to be 1950s style but had a big flat screen television in one shot. Although we wanted the whole clash between past and present environments to work we probably could have put an older looking TV in this one shot, other than that i feel the contrast between these works well.
Our main objective when producing this short film was to make people happy and laugh and we received positive feedback about this with the majority saying that the film cheered them up and made them happy.
I agree with all the feedback as we were well aware about the music which was the most negative feedback that we received.
We also uploaded our short film onto face book which gave the public a chance to view our work and give us feedback on it, I feel this was a great way to receive feedback because most of the people that would have watched it wouldn’t have known much about short films etc. Most the feedback received was positive and that the dog was a very popular and well liked character.

Individual Contributions

We never got much chance for to have individual contributions as we were a pair and we worked extremely well together therefore meaning that we both contributed equally. Our final idea was decided as a pair during inspiration week and any changes to this idea was decided as a pair. Whilst Jade did the majority of the presentation and the storyboards I did all other pre planning work such as, production schedules, synopsis, mood board, questionnaire etc. Filming was done together and we agreed on everything during filming. Editing was also done together and I did the title sequence for our piece.

Improvements

After producing, editing and distributing our final piece when we watched it back I think we realised how good our final project actually was. Although we do feel it was a very successful project obviously there’s room for improvement. If we could do it again I would have liked to have paid more attention to the editing of music, the transition between music was at a couple of times very sudden and didn’t work to week, if given more time and more variety I would also have liked to had more choice in music so that we didn’t have to repeat the first song played. As well as this I feel that one part of the film that could have done with more shots is the part of Bethan where she’s waiting for her husband to come home and then eats the cake. I also feel that to have had more comical effect on the audience we should have made Nialls last face expression more effective to show how much he was actually disappointed in Bethan.
Other than this I feel the strength and simplicity of our narrative worked very well therefore producing a very strong piece. This meant that our audience didn’t really have to think about what was going on during the film. I feel the style of acting and camera also worked well and made our piece to be as good as it is.

Final thoughts

Overall I feel that everything from our contributions to the filming and editing all worked well therefore producing a very strong video piece. This was by far the most successful video project I have produced since being at the BRIT and I feel that this was because my thoughts and say counted and I was working with someone who is very similar to me and we get along. Working together could have gone very wrong in the way that we are friends therefore we could have been lazy but because we both wanted to achieve a good project it worked out well.

The Tale of the Lady & the Cake.

Final piece: Whilst getting to the our end stages of editing we could already see that our piece was going to be better then we would have ever expected it to. When editing we had to watch our piece back time and time again and this got very boring and reputive and made me not like it so much. But after going on easter holidays then coming back and showing our final piece to our class it seemed like all our efforts had paid off and that our piece was actually really good. Of course we found a couple of things that could have been improved on;

1) The music, maybe if we would have put more effort into the music then we could have cross faded it better so that there werent such sudden sharp changes, but you dont notice these things until you watch it back and its to late.

2) Shots, we could have got more interesting shots of Bethan and Ellie eating the cake to maybe make it more funny and to have more effect on our audience.

Like weaknesses, you also have strengths and i think our strongest elements are the style of acting, if the acting wouldnt have been so over exaggerated and enthusiastic then it wouldnt have the comical feel to it.

Although iv said some of the music could have been cross faded better i also feel that our choice of music worked very well, the tone of the music makes the tone and mood of the film better.

As opposed to using black and white effect for our film i think the use of grainy discolouring effect works just as well if not better. It gives off a 1950's look and makes the contrast between old fashioned acting and a modern environment work well.

The Tale of the Lady & the Cake.

Pre Planning: After a lot of thought in to our idea for our final piece we ended up changing the ending of our idea quite a lot until we were happy. We both sat down and assigned different jobs to each other, whilst Jade did some of the presentation and storyboards i got on with doing our production schedule, synopsis, questionaires, moodboard and a brief description of what we were hoping to achieve. Because we worked together and agreed on things and just let each other get on with what we wanted to do we got our pre planning done pretty quick and it was all quite good work. If i could do the pre planning again i dont think i would change anything because its because of the pre planning that our piece worked so well.

The Tale of the Lady & the Cake.

Editing: Myself and Jades strengths have never been within editing and because of this we didnt want to complicate things to much and we just wanted to put it all together and then play with buttons and see what we could do etc.

We both worked really well together on editing and both of our ideas of how our final piece would look were the same which make it easier to work together. We log and captured our footage together and began putting out shots in order. As our shot all come together we began to get more of an idea on how we could make it better and how we wanted it to look (which was different to how we first thought). Because we did get more than enough footage when filming we were at an advantage where we were able to try out how good or bad different shots would be. After creating our sequence we cut the footage to our best and we played around with effects and titles until it looked how we wanted it to.

Our main weakness through editing was defiently finding and then cutting music to perfection. As we never really knew what our music would sound like we didnt really know what we were looking for. We spent a whole lesson on soundtrack pro and we never found anything that would work so then we resulted in looking through CDS. From 2 CDS we found all the tracks that we have on our piece and all our hard work of looking for music seem to have paid off. After finding the music we had to cut it to fit our film and the different shots, this was the hardest and even know there are still a couple of little bits we could have made sound better.

Music was probably the hardest part of editing our short film as we had to find music that cut well with it and that went along with the different moods of the film.

The Tale of the Lady & the Cake.

We filmed on the 11th of March at my house, we chose to film here because we was able to take advantage of the modern environment. Bethan Harrison and Niall laffey were our actors, we chose Bethan because she fits the whole 1950's style i.e. hair, dress sense etc and we chose Niall because he's the serious character that we was looking for.

We encountered a few problems in the beginning because the camcorded chewed up our tape so then we had to go to Nialls to borrow an old one of his. After this we began filming and we started by filming Bethan doing her house chores of cleaning, this all went well and Bethans acting skills were not what we expected and if they would have been any different then the film probaly wouldnt have worked. After this we filmed the cake scene i.e. making the cake, eating the cake etc. Even though filming this bit correctly was vitual it was also important to us to enjoy ourselves whilst filming. Maybe we enjoyed ourselves a bit to much and we never got as many shots as we would have liked of Bethan eating the cake. After filming this bit we filmed what was going to be the beginning of our film i.e. Bethan getting out of bed and getting dressed etc. Again this all went to plan and worked better then we expected.

To ensure that we had enough footage to edit with we made sure we had several different shots of every scene so that we were able to adjust and make our piece of short film better. When it came to the editing process we didnt have any problems with any footage because we had enough of it.