For A2 practical work, I chose to work in the medium of television, in the hope to produce a short film to be broadcast on television. For my A/S, I produced the 1st 3mins of a film thriller, working indepently. This year there were three others in my group Francis Anon Burton, Chris Welbeck and Mathew Sheedy. We began by putting forward ideas in order to gain some sort of narrative on which we could expand our ideas. Originally Francis Anon was working independently, and hence he had a few provisional plans onto which we could deliberate.
The over riding theme that wanted to be exposed through our film was domestic violence. After much deliberation we formulated a narrative that everyone was happy to pursue. Many compromises had to be made along the process to formulating our final narrative, such conflicts included that of characters that would be major protagonists in the story. Half the group felt that the story should involve tension between a mother and father, whereas the other half felt it should pursue tension between father and son.After much planning we mutually felt that the latter idea would be more practical.
Basically, it was about a boy that has been getting abused by a drunken step father, with his original mother murdered by his step Dad he has no where to go and is forced to live with him. After several drunken beatings and constant domestic abuse, the young lad finally finds the confidence to confront his stepfather. In a steamy confrontation the boy ends up stabbing his stepfather bringing a sombre end to the film.We decided that with this film we would be able to add hidden messages, through various connotations and we were also intrigued with the ideas of religious significance.
Something that we genuinely wanted to pursue, however internal problems meant that religion was not an area to be exploited. In terms of our filming there were just two main locations, my house, which acted as the house for the stories main protagonist, fittingly called 'Eddie', the second area of filming, was the college. This was necessary for the opening scene as we wanted to make it look like a classroom set up.In order to adequately pull this off it was vital that we were able to get extras to play the parts of pupils and also and adult to play the teacher. In order to gain these essentials the most obvious approach was to gain accesses to a drama class complete with Drama teacher. This task proved to be very difficult as many of the teachers were busy, with not much time on their schedules.
However out of pot luck we were able to persuade a drama class, to leave the classroom for just one lesson in order to do the filming, for our opening scene.In general the shooting for the classroom scene went very well. It took the best part of an hour to get all of the shots that we were happy with. The most difficult part in the opening scene was the editing stage; this was for a combination of reasons. Firstly we wanted the classroom scene to appear to be thriving with schoolyard banter. In order to gain this desired effect we had to make shore that the editing was fast and clean cut, with the emphasis on the shots making the scene appear livelier.
However this scene experienced to very different levels when it came to the editing process. We decided that we wanted the class to appear rowdy at first, yet when the teacher comes in on the rowdy class a much more sombre feeling is brought to the scene. High angle shots used to signify his status amongst the pupils, we all mutually agreed worked very well. The editing process was a major factor in the presentation of our film, a good example of this is the bike scene.
In which 'Eddie' is returning home from college on his bike to confront his estranged stepfather.The reason that the editing process was so important in this scene was because it was the quick and accurate cuts that made the journey on the bike look so clean cut. In this scene we experimented with a few different shots with a view to giving the viewer a whole range of perspectives. This bike worked very well with the following scenes in the house as the flowed together with one continues shot. Despite certain difficulties amongst the editing process, in terms of cast and crew we decided that I should play the main character, as I would mean less messing around when it came to the filming process.
We found that in the past you cannot always rely on an outsider to show up to all the shoots, hence naturally we thought it would be a good idea to sort out the casting amongst ourselves. In terms of technical work, there were not too many special effects that we added to the film. However in various shots, the system by which we edited the film, allowed us to make changes to the appearance of the shot, by either picking up it's speed or slowing it down.A good example of a shot being speeded up is during the bike scene, originally we felt that ' eddie' was riding the bike far too slowly, hence we speeded the shot up to what looked like a more realistic speed.
Another example of shot alteration is the scene in which the stepfather gets stabbed. In this scene we used an eerie effect of severely slowing down the shot. This meant that the shot depicted, a knife falling very slowly to the ground, this slow shot was complemented by the fact that the sound effect was bicameral slowed down as well.
