Jake Jake film reflection

The first part of the module required us to write go through all the stages of writing a script, and in the end two of the scripts would be produced. It was all new to me, as I never knew and imagined that there would be all the stages before having the final script. But having to go through all the stages myself when writing the script really helped me gain understanding of the process of writing a script. First step is the idea, the “What if?”, the general subject of the film. My idea was to have a film about a girl and an imaginary friend. The second was the pitch, where we had to present the idea in front of the class and have questions and additional suggestions from them. The third was the outline, which includes the main characters and presents the narrative. The fourth step was the treatment, which is a scene by scene break down in short paragraphs. This step really helps the details of the story develop, and the characters evolve. This is where I developed all my scenes and details about how the film will work, and also gave me an idea of whether the film would work or not. The next step is the script itself, which is quite a hard step. It is what the viewer would see on the screen but explained in detail. The story developed from the first idea to the final script, they almost do not sound similar at all. The initial idea was to have a girl who appears to have imaginary friends but actually has multiple personality; in the end the story almost turned on its head, as the final story from the script is that the girl has an imaginary friend, but her family do not know this and they are worried she might have mental problems. The second part of the module was to choose two of the scripts written by us and produce them. I was in the team to produce Michaela’s film, about a man who whilst trying to get signal on his phone goes into a playground and climbs on something, and he gets bullied by some children that are not there. The film is open ended and it doesn’t give an explanation of what was happening. We shot everything in two days. It was a bit of a struggle to find the set in the end. We initially chose one of the locations I found, the park that was by the train tracks, and quite deserted and dodgy. when we went to film it proved that it was actually very dodgy as there was a group of guys who were a bit dangerous if we stayed to film, and we didn't want to put ourselves and the equipment in danger. so we went strolling downs streets trying to find a new park. In the end we thought about Swans Lake park which was public enough that no one could pick on us, but hidden enough that there weren't that many people using it. We did have few families with children that came in, but they saw us working so they avoided as much as possible the corner we were using. Everything went smoothly, James the actor was good and understood our directions. I was on camera and Lawrence was directing it. Michaela and Stephanie were there to help with whatever we needed. It only took a couple of hours on each of the days We had to make small changes to the script on the spot, so it was useful to have Michaela there to help out, as she wrote the script. The script was quite specific about the setting of the park, and the order of all the components so it was hard to find a park that had all the components from the script nearby each other. The main things we needed in the script were swings, a seesaw and a roundabout. The one we used in the end had the swings and seesaw but it didn't have the roundabout so we had to use the scales and slides instead. It worked out well in the end. We had a few setbacks when it came to editing; the sound has not been recorded until two days before the deadline, as I had to do it without it being my responsibility but offered for the sake of the film and our degree in essence; and because we rely entirely on ICE to do the editing we had to finish and export the film on the day of the deadline as the day before was bank holiday and the building was shut and Lawrence was not available the days before that. The bad side of this is that it’s a dangerous, and it is a risk to leave the final editing to do on the day of the deadline as something could go wrong and if we don’t meet the deadline our degree could be affected. Another negative is that the group is not able to see the film before the hand in, therefore we cannot write a critical review of the film, we can only reflect on the pre-production, production and post-production processes, and on how the team worked. The positive side is that it is a learning experience, and we can get the lessons learnt as an outcome; to have better communications with the team, and to start the post production a lot earlier. There were the only negatives of this part of the module; the team did not work at its best, as we do not fully know each other therefore we did not manage to make the most out of our individual skills. Working in a team is hard, especially when the team is fairly new and has not worked together like this before. There have been communication difficulties and miscommunications between the members, and as a result the sound has not been recorded in time and I did it. Another thing that we would do different the second time would be having a timeline and deadlines for each task. As an effect of not doing this, the editing was delayed and we ended up finishing the editing process on the day of the deadline, which also influenced our reflective essay as we could not analyze the final product without seeing it.