STORYTELLING UNIT: FINAL EVALUATION

During this project I have learnt many different skills, both with screenwriting and technical film making. As well as developed my current skills right through this project.

I feel that my final script has turned out really well. From my initial pitch of a Thriller drama when I was told that this couldn't be done since it didn't comply with the brief that we were given. I quickly changed my idea and developed it into a different story and was able to take inspiration for different short films as well as take a concept from the Doctor Who series and use my own family's past as a reference to a storyline and ended up making a strong 10 minute script which has been properly formatted and follows all the rules that Steve taught us in our lectures and I can confidently say I'm happy with it which for a writer, is really important. As regards to production, I've been told that I'm not only the first, first year, but actually the first TVP student to take a green screen into the car park and make successful use out of it. I feel I did really well with this and worked professionally throughout the production stage. When it came to setting up and working with the green screen I had excellent time management and got it set up quickly and correctly with plenty of time to spare. When an issue arised like when my actors dropped out on me the day before, I didn't panic but quickly solved the issue and found new actors and worked quickly to ensue I didn't fall behind schedule. I used my contacts and sorted things like getting the wedding ring made and using 2 different cars and also getting a crew together and communicating well with them all so that everyone understood what I needed and what it was we had to shoot. On set me and my crew worked professionally and worked to schedule, even when we went over schedule during the green screen shoot we got everything shot and done before losing the light of the sun which was the important bit. Looking into post-production, my strengths were with my green screen and audio. My audio work went well and when I was faced with the issue of Zak's audio, I wasted no time and got Zak into the studios and he re-watched the scene over and over until he got the timing right and we re-recorded his audio and I synced it up in post and it worked really well. As well as my audio editing making the 2nd scenes music sound like it's inside the house before the door opens and also adding a high pass filter to the music to make it sound like it's coming from the radio speakers which worked really well. As well as making the green screen look realistic and worked to make the concept of a moving car really well.

The issues with the production would have to be one section of the green screen footage where I couldn't matt it out due to bad lighting. I tried garbage matting and altering the ultra key settings but nothing could get rid of this section in the corner of the window, it's only visible for a few frames in one shot but you can see it and it takes away the realism of the car driving. As well another issue was the audio from scene 2, I chose to record this separately and this proved to be a really bad idea as syncing it became an issue and also the quality wasn't very good either. For the other 2 scenes I recorded into the camera and this helped much more and brought much better quality of audio. Finally, during the Production stage we had an issue with lighting which was that the opening shot for scene 1 was filmed in the morning and the rest of the scene was in the afternoon so there's a huge light difference with the sun, this annoyingly couldn't be fixed in post like I'd hoped it could since the lighting is far too obvious and really hard to try and colour out with colour correction. This ruins the video slightly since it takes away the continuity from the opening shot.

If I were to improve this in the future I would focus on my time management with pre-production and give myself more time if I am going to use actors instead of classmates. This is where my project nearly fell apart but could have been avoided if I'd have sorted secondary actors and ensured the actors were ready to film. Also ensure that my actors don't clash during the shooting days since this was an issue when recording the green screen and we went 3 hours over schedule, although we fixed this, it could have been avoided. Finally I'd ensure that all scene shots are filmed with the same lighting to avoid any issues with continuity in the future.