Creating My Own Short Film...

As an aside to my work on the thriller opening, I've been working on something by myself to build on my film-making skills. This all came about from a recent short-film competition that was run by the school and, although this was separate to my work on our group's thriller, I saw this as an opportunity to learn more audiences, conventions of genre and how to construct meaning through editing, mise-en-scene, camera and sound. In other words, I felt this project would help me to develop a more comprehensive understanding of film-making, and whereas I could afford to be more reliant on other group members on the more technical aspects of things such as editing (perhaps my weakest skill), this would give me the chance to practice these things on my own, independently, without help. And, actually, I felt this work could reinforce everything that I've learnt in the past year about media and film-making. Therefore, I  began to set about making my own short-film....

I knew from the off-set that I wanted to produce something entirely different to the thriller genre. I came to this decision purely because I felt I could challenge myself by approaching something new. Again, the genre would be fresh, which meant I could adapt my understanding of film-making from my Media Studies lessons. Actually, I decided on a genre that isn't actually what I would call a cinematic genre; recently on Youtube there has been a craze (no, not the Harlem Shake) known as Document Your Life. Youtubers upload these clips each month, and although the style of these video's can afford to differentiate from one another from person to person, I understood that there were a few conventions to these video's:-

a) The music would have an ethereal, relaxing tone. Non-diegetic sound is often more prominent than actual diegetic sound in order to create a more atmospheric tone.

b) In terms of mise-en-scene, video's can contain anything: it's very much free and creative in the sense that the video should literally document what's going on in your day. However, the video's are very stylised and have quite an exaggerated, dream-like style. Therefore, there should be vibrant colours and video's could feature objects that have connotations of happiness and peace.

c) Shots are often close-up to give the audience more of a connection to the action on screen. Again,panning and transitions are all acceptable but the film should feel naturalistic and minimalist in it's style. Out of focus shots and shots that don't use tripods again give it a more naturalistic, atmospheric tone.

d) Editing isn't too fancy; action isn't very fast-paced so there aren't a lot of quick cuts.

Having established the conventions of this internet-based genre, I set about filming this project. I used a Canon camera in order to capture high definition shots, which could also provide shots that could be out-of-focus and generally more artistic. The following is the short that I made:

To edit this I used the 'iMovie' software that's typically found on all Macs. Again, this was slightly different to my work on thrillers (we're editing that using AdobePremierePro) and I did this purposely because I'm not much of a fan of Adobe's software- I thought my inability to edit came as a result of me not being too tech-savvy, but I found the iMovie editing process to be a lot easier and self-explanatory than using the aforementioned editing software, so perhaps it's just a matter of personal taste. 

The chance to practice editing was invaluable really to my learning. The past few weeks, I've been assigned the task of scouring the lowly depths of copyright-free-music websites for my thriller work and whilst I was okay with that job, I suddenly realised that everyone else in the group had massively improved their editing skills and I uh, well... didn't have a clue. And so this task really forced me to get to grips with editing clips, putting in transitions, adding text over the top as well as adding non-diegetic audio clips. Following this, I now feel more equipped to tackle the technical aspects of editing software.

To wrap up the other things that I considered when making this video, I used naturalistic lighting to further reinforce the authenticity of the piece. Moreover, there's actually only one effect in the video, just the one transition at the end, and again I felt this made my short feel more real, and feel like more of an intimate insight. None of the action was storyboarded, and it was completely improvised, amassing around an hours worth of footage by keeping the camera rolling; this ensured that I could select the best shots and not have worry about falling short on the running length (something that I think has troubled our group as we stick to quite a rigid, structured storyboard and suddenly realise that our timings were off). Having said that, there wasn't much structure or much of a narrative to this video but even so, I think I've learnt my lessons about the con's of placing too much significance on storyboarding over the past few weeks.

In summation, I feel like I've had a real learning curve through the process of creating my own short film. I've felt as though I've learnt about the technical aspects of editing that have given me more confidence when approaching the dreaded AdobePremierePro when editing our thriller. Also, I have been able to build upon my understanding of genres, institutions and conventions which will not only help me as exam practice, but will give me more of an understanding when it comes to writing an evaluation for our thriller. And finally, it was great to try and test myself independently, to see where I was in terms of my ability and to see what I needed to improve upon. Therefore, this task was invaluable to giving me a more comprehensive understanding of film-making and what that entails..