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1. STAGE 5
PRODUCTION
REFLECTIONS
Your Name

2.  This week was first week in this rotation. It consisted of of us filling in
our initial plans document for our short film which included creating a
mind map to brainstorm ideas for our short film as well as creating a
mood board. In terms of how I feel about this work I was struggling for
ideas with my short film so I thought back to reports of stalking's in the
news and wondered how I could adapt that into a horror film. I began
to think about other things such as films were the protagonist dies at
the end and wanting to incorporate this into my film. I also began to
look at other classic effects and ways of creating atmosphere that Is
used in other films and TV shows of the horror/thriller genre such as
jump scares and flickering lights both of which I tried to incorporate
into my film later on. Coming up with all these ideas lead to me
realising what I wanted to do for my final film. A lot of these ideas I
didn’t come up with until I had finished my mind map and mood board.

3.  This was our second week in this rotation. We started out watching
several short films to give ourselves an idea of how short films work
and what we should be working towards. My favourite was the 2013
version of lights out as I had already seen 2016 feature length
version of this film so I already knew what to expect. I really liked the
concept and I though it was very effective as it had me terrified for
days when switching of a light in the dark. The jump scare at the end
was still very scary even thought it was expected as the appearance
of the creature once it was fully revealed was horrific. We were given
a task to analyse three of the films and pick which one we liked best.
Another thing we did this week was sound editing using pholey
techniques were we had to go around college recording the sound of
various objects and adding it to a muted clip of Shaun of the Dead. I
think my version worked really well as there were parts of it that
actually sounded like it could be in the real film.

4.  This week mostly consisted of filling in and completing the pre production
documents. Because the documents were so big I thought I was almost
certainly going to fall behind and not be able to do them all in time and
that it was going to eat into the time that I had. With this thought in mind I
started working on the documents, as I was worried I wasn’t going to be
able to finish them in time when I was working on them I didn’t mess
about or get distracted and because of this I managed to complete them
all in time so that I had all of the following week to film and complete my
film. In terms of the documents themselves I thought they were very long
however in my opinion some of the work in them is unnecessary for
producing this short film however it was all necessary to learn for future
purposes and for working in the industry.

5.  This week was the week were we finally got the film our short film. I filmed
mine first, the scenes we filmed outside were fine but once we went inside
we forgot the camera was on manual focus so we filmed everything and it
looked fine on the camera monitor but once we put the clips onto the
computer and watched them back it was all out of focus. Therefore later on
during the afternoon I had to go reshoot most of my film. This wasn’t
necessarily a bad thing as it included a learning curve in that you know if
you are filming in MF then you need to made sure the camera is always in
focus whenever you film. I was lucky enough to have a contingency plan if
something went wrong and extra time to do reshoots however I may be in
situations in the future were I don’t have this opportunity so as I director it is
my job and responsibility to make sure there are no technical issues. In
terms of the shoots and the final film itself I was actually really satisfied with
it as I manages to get my editing done by the end of the week as well. I am
really happy with how my film has turned out and those who have seen it
were really impressed with it and how atmospheric it was and how well the
music builds up the tension.

6.  This week is dedicated to evaluating our work and uploading it to
YouTube and Slide share and then linking it to our blog so our tutors
can view our final pieces of work for this rotation. I then had to start
working on my evaluation which included a peer assessment as well as
me reflecting on my filming process as well as technical qualities with
different pieces of equipment and then an overview of our film in
general. I usually find self evaluation quite hard but as this was talking
more about my thought process I went through whilst editing and
adding the different effect I found it easier to talk about. The harder part
was talking about things I would do better or change next time around
however after talking to one of my tutors he gave m several tips on
what would be good to go back and change. One thing I realised I
would like to do is take some of the clips home and edit a version that
isn’t limited to being one minuet just for myself to see how it would look.
One final thing we had to do was have other people in our class do 3
quick peer assessments on our film just to give us an idea of what the
audience may thing if this was a real film. We then had to summarise it
to finish our evaluation document. This was the last thing we had to do
to finish of our short film rotation.