4 hour Film Task

The">https://vimeo.com/141150894">The Conversation
from Jakob">https://vimeo.com/user43481888">Jakob Morrison on Vimeo.https://vimeo.com">Vimeo.>
On 1st October, our HNC group (Francesca Smith, Lalita Ajit, Jessica Barratt, Beth Heath, Katie Tooth and myself) were set with the task of creating a short film within a four hour time-frame of the days' scheduled lessons. This would include the conjuring up of a plot, production of cinematic shots and editing them together ready to present the following day in class. In order to inspire our creativity, we were set with the limitation of our films being titled "The Conversation" and the plot being related to just that, whichever way we decided that would be a part of the film.

We were advised by our teachers to assign ourselves to a specific creative role. However, this assignment did not take place because of uncomfortable open discussion within our group. Its my belief that our initial lack of group cohesion was due to a lack of working on prior tasks together before this project.

Instinctively, I felt that I would best suit the role of the Cinematographer due to my previous study of film at A Level that other team members did not have the experience of doing. On the other hand, numerous members of the team had taken photography courses which meant that they were better suited to operating the DSLR cameras. In post-production, this became evident to me by the apparent variation in quality of the footage. Towards the end of our film, during which I was not the camera operator, the quality is noticeably superior as less digital noise and over/under-exposure is present. However, I also reason that this change in roles (of which allowed me to focus on editing the first half) caused the plot to become less of a focus and hence it became unclear to the audience. This uncertainty was later expressed by our classmates in reviewal of our film.

In conclusion, I believe a better-established direction and assignment of clear creative roles would have significantly improved our film. A struggle between which direction to take the production and overall un-organisation caused a significant amount of time at the beginning of the shooting to be lost.