WEEKLY REFLECTIONS
To start this new project I had to write a project proposal about my new short film. During this I had to rethink about my previous projects and point out my areas for improvement and go into details about ways i could change them to then help better this upcoming film.
week 1.
week 2.
When writing the script, we knew we wanted a band consisting of 4 teenagers, battling their own personal problems however they are brought together by playing music. so when it came to thinking of a plot we wanted some happy moments but a strong argument in the middle causing them to separate however they re-join towards the end.
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Script writing has begun and already nearly done.
week 3.
In this week we finished our script, however after reviewing it with our lecturer we realized the language and content within the film isn't appropriate for an educational setting and as we are considering submitting our film to festivals we made the executive decision to cut all swearing from the film entirely.
We then proceeded to create a survey on the topic of swearing in movies.
week 4.
As 'The Exiles' is a band film we knew we would need some instruments, we scoured the internet and came across a whole drum set on Facebook for £60, we then used Reuben's dads old bass guitar and a friends electric guitar along with Reubens microphone.
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Along with the props, we would need some spaces to use as a recording studio and somewhere to film a gig scene, to do this we used our colleges TV studio with stage and strobe lighting and put up sound dampening walls and added a stage.
week 5.
Casting was easy for us as we had written our characters around specific actors who we had worked with previously. For example the actor who played Dante I had worked with him on a previous Northern School of Art students film, however a practical problem we faced was the fact he attended a different college to the rest of this, so we had to create a schedule which worked around us all, this ended up as filming mainly on Tuesdays and Fridays, this also highlight's the importance of planning.
We later decided we wanted a therapist within the movie, in which our course peer Kiera decided to last minute fill in for us .
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Mickey, Brie, Anni and miss carter are all characters played by members of 'The council Productions' which is a small production company we formed in college.
week 6.
We started rehearsals, along with a table read of the full script,
A theoretical problem we had was struggling to get into character, so we tried many different techniques, these included the magic if, animal studies and uta Hagen's 9 questions.
week 7.
We started filming with doing the intro first, this involved using a camera gimbal and our camera director moving around the band as they preformed a song. Taking inspiration for 'The Dirt' we where originally going to have voice over from Reubens character Mickey but we ended up liking the way we filmed the song with no pauses better.
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We then put a stage in the TV studio to transform it into our Gig space and had over 15 extras acting as our audience.
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The final scene we filmed this week was our therapy scene consisting our our main character Mickey seeking help.
week 8.
Scenes we filmed this week are
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Alley fight scene
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The boys help Mickey
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The ending
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Voiceovers
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The arguement
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Miss Carters office scene
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This all went smoothly as we where able to get grip of how we wanted scenes to look with camera movements ect.
week 9.
During this week I was able start editing and get a feel for how I wanted to film to run, I tried out many different editing styles to try find one I found fitting.
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A Technical problems we had was with editing as i was trying to be ambitious with it, meaning I wanted to go all out with effects, I played around with certain tricks like adding freeze frames and character outlines then followed by a sped up action, however after researching on how to achieve this and finally adding it in the film I didn't like how it looked in the moment so I took it out, another editing issue was syncing up the audio to the scenes as we where using music pre-recorded and sang by a different person to who plays the character, in the opening scene it starts off with the band playing a song and the camera panning around the different members however when the camera got to the lead singer mickey we realized he wasn't singing the correct part of the song, so in editing I cut that part of the song and replaced it with an instrumental part.
week 10.
In this time I needed to polish up my portfolio, double checking all information and research is on there and add the credits to the final draft of the film ready for everything to be submitted.