Exhibiting our short film

Although I am pretty sure we will not, here is information on exhibiting our short film, if we choose to do so:

Youtube - The most popular video hosting website, everybody uses it therefore we have more of a chance of reaching viewers from all other the world (language barrier is not an issue as there is little dialogue). It is also easy to share the link to the video with friends and it is quick and simple to upload in HD format.

Vimeo - This is targeted more towards the professionals in the media industry. It has a sophisticated interface and is used by budding directors and industry professionals, allowing them to leave feedback and comment on your work. Also, the BDC strand have their own channel, allowing us to upload our work to it. 

Short Film Final Evaluation

Generally, I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project, despite the reel of never-ending problems. Our finished product does not include the highly anticipated voiceover, for the simple reason that we did not want to overload the piece, and wanted the audiences concentration to be on the underlying message depicted through the narrative, by using a variety of shots. I believe this works well as I believe the voice-over would of made the film look amateur and ‘cheesy’, very student-esque. We wanted to create a minimalist approach, and stay away from the student genre as much as possible.


Another effective aspect of our short film is the variety of shots we included. As a group, we discussed how we didn’t just want to use conventional shots (medium, wide, close-up). We wanted to include tracking shots, using an office wheeley chair as the dolly, over-the-shoulder shots, steady-cam shots and film all of it hand-held, to achieve the realistic, gritty approach to delivering our narrative. Although in some areas the hand-held approach to holding our camera failed, it doesn’t look ‘gritty’, it just looks amateur. I believe our variation of shots is a strong point of our short film as it makes it visually interesting to the audience, as there is no dialogue or voice-over, this is what is keeping the audience interested, and eager to carry on watching. Also, the fact our narrative is so powerful and has an underlying strong life message, it was important to make these shots diverse so that we do not diminish this and do the message no justice.


Additionally, a strong point of our short film was the chosen locations. As we wanted to achieve the realistic and gritty feel it was important we filmed in locations that reflected this. We decided to film the piggy bank smash in Natasha’s house as it was extraordinarily  bizarre and eccentric, helping our short film not to conform to stereotypical student film conventions. We filmed the most important scenes, the convenience store scenes, in a shop in Tulse Hill, South London, as it had the run down desired ambience and the location was ideal, on a main road,  accentuating our urban genre. Also, the fact the shopkeeper was extremely helpful and eager to help some very stressed students out, made us film in this perfect little shop.


Despite this, we did face numerous problems with our short film, first being the music. As a group, we spent hours in the editing suite watching our sequence on loop, trying to decide on a music genre to suit our film. I wanted something quite urban, but a bit more obscure, something very similar to The Streets, as their music featured in films such as Adulthood, which has similar messages and cinematography to our short film. However, our bickering carried on for too long and as per usual, we left it too late! Amazingly, Darren managed to find copyright free music (which he in fact paid for), that suited our short film. It wasn’t perfect, it had voice in each “my name’s Johnny”, whereas we was looking for an instrumental. Therefore I believe we could have found music to suit and reflect our cinematography and message a lot more, if given more time.


Another problem we faced was continuity. Due to lack of footage, we were forced to splice a lot of shots, putting them together with other spliced shots as the continuity does not match up. For example, when our actor Oljan heads to sit on the floor we stopped filming, then filmed a new shot when he was sitting down, oblivious to the fact he was not wearing his hat. If we would have filmed this continuously (as our short film is in real time) this would not have been an issue. This happened with another scene where our actress Nadine walks out of the shop, for a second you could see our bags, highly unprofessional, consequently we had to cut that out, making the flow of the shot sporadic.


The fact we could not book out a boom mic resulted in the sound quality of the dialogue being poor, and hard to understand, hence the subtitles. When asking people to watch our short film for feedback, they were very confused as to why we included subtitles. We believe it was necessary, as some people may not be able to hear the dialogue, as it is very quiet, especially along with the non-diegetic music. This is a downside to our project, as if we would have filmed the sound accordingly, we would not have had to include subtitles and bewilder audiences.


The target audience of Take Note is males and females aged 13 - 35, including all demographics. We entertained and appealed to our audience through editing techniques, characters, ‘sweet shop’ nostalgia, element of lack of money, urban surroundings and genre of non-diegetic music. We used simple editing techniques to appeal to a more mature audience, also so that the viewers attention is on the narrative and the variation of shots. The urban surroundings appeal to a cultured audience, urban life is rapid and speedy, stereotypically young people are seen to be able to keep up with this. The non-diegetic music is of a hip-hop/grime genre and is instrumental. This emphasizes our gritty element as grime music is conventionally associated with London (an urban environment) and typically relates to a younger audience as it has only existed for, at the most, 15 years.


My role within the production was director, and chief executive of writing the narrative. Fulfilling the role of director was exceedingly challenging and strenuous, and I believe at that point in time that role was not right for me, and I believe it would have been more suited to Darren, as the idea was his. Although I wrote the narrative and synopsis, I did not write the shot list, therefore it was immensely difficult to direct the cast and production crew.


This was my third project working with the amazing Kai and Darren. Our ideas bounce off each other, and we all have eminently similar desires for the outcomes of our video pieces. Regardless, we do tend to bicker, as we are very good friends, and are all very headstrong that sometimes we cannot see the other persons point clearly. I believe this is most probably the last time we will work as a group on the course, due to the fact that we feel that we do not want to kill the ‘spark’ we have as a group. Also, working with different people will emphasize different ideas underlying in our minds, waiting to be awakened.


After studying the genre of short film for months (that felt never-ending), it was important that our short film conformed to the conventions of one, as it defeats the point otherwise. Our short film conforms to the conventions as: it includes little dialogue, it delivers a strong underlying message through the narrative, it’s short, it consists of little post-production effects, we filmed on a low budget, we had a small cast and it is less genre-specific.


To conclude, I could say I was happy with our finished product, although I would not say I was proud of it. However much I hate to blame the misfortunes on the robbery mishap, it did trigger a lot of problems with our project. Being away from the piece for so long made us loose our focus and forget the direction we originally chose to follow. I believe if we would have filmed more footage and included more of a backstory, adding increased depth to our narrative, audiences would understand it more and the message would be increasingly effective.

Having to have a break from editing...

Due to the computers going missing the editing process has been suspended to further notice. Although this does give me Kai and Darren a chance to talk and think about how we want our finished short film to look, and whether we want to include a voiceover or not.

Where we are in the editing process at the moment

We have log and captured all our footage and constructed a sequence which is the basis for our short film. I also created an opening title in Adobe Photoshop, which took me about 2 hours (with no help from Kai and Darren as their levels of experience do not match up to my expertise. We have made no revisions to our original idea, although I, personally, believe it is a necessity for us to reshoot. We didn’t think through every narrative structure, therefore there is a certain part in the sequence where a shot cuts too quickly to another, consequently forcing the narrative to fail, and the storyline to make no sense. After talking to Mrs Matthews, she suggested we reshoot to give the five pound note a back-story, adding depth to our film. Although Kai and Darren and disagree with me completely. Darren has found backing music that is available for us to purchase for the copyright to be lifted and so that we can use it without any problems regarding piracy. We need to finish the script in the meantime so that when we get the edit suite back we can dive straight back into the work.

PowerPoint Presentation

Editing Diary - Week ending Friday 5th November 2010

This was our first week in the edit suite, so it consisted of logging and capturing all the shots we are using.  It was a good opportunity to watch all the footage back as a group, making a mental note of where we want each shot and what we want to do with it. We named all the shots and I began to make the opening titles on Adobe Photoshop. As I feel most confident with this programme, the group nominated me to do this. I opened the film and video pre-set template and downloaded a suitable True Type font and carried it into Photoshop. After creating a piece of text that coincided with the themes of our short film, the most important aspect was making sure the background was transparent. This was important as we plan to have it over an existing shot of the piggy bank. I had a lot of problems with saving it as different file formats to keep the transparent background, in the end the PNG file worked, so hurrah!

How the filming process went

It was one of those mornings... I woke up late, everything was going wrong. Also, I kind of left Kai and Darren at the station for an hour, oh well! We made our way to Natasha’s house (location 1) and began to set up for the first part of “Take Note”. This involved the opening pull focus shot of the piggy bank, leading into the tracking shot downstairs to when the piggy bank is no more, and gets smashed to smithereens! We had to get this absolutely perfect, as we could only film it once! We used a conventional office wheeley chair to get the desired track effect. Darren sat on the chair and held the camera as I dragged it from behind, pulling in the right directions. The smash of the piggy bank went perfectly, exactly how we desired, so by this time it was time to brief out actors and actresses and head out on the streets. 

The most difficult part of the day was finding a convenience store that would let us film inside. We must have asked about twenty shops, until we found the perfect one, which had odd, but ambient lighting inside, emphasizing the oddness of our narrative. We briefed the shopkeeper as to what exactly we would be filming and how we would need him to cooperate, he was exceedingly helpful, and eager to help us young students out. The main problem was dealing with customers in the shop, as of course we could not just kick them out, so we had to be immensely patient, and increasingly flexible. Unfortunately, we attracted a lot of attention whilst filming the homeless scenes outside as it was on a busy main road. Thinking back, maybe it would have been best to film in a quieter location, although we wanted cars to be passing in the background, and we had to keep near the shop for continuity purposes. After filming everything, we thanked the shopkeeper, grabbed some chips and headed back to Natasha’s to watch the footage back, making sure we had filmed our desired shots before it was too late. 

To conclude, the day was a success, despite constant bickering in the group, and dealing with bewildered members of the public. Regardless, I still believe we should have filmed over two days, filming alternative endings and varying shots, leaving us with more choice when it comes to the editing process. However, as our short film happens in realtime, continuity is a real issue and is what will make our film look professional and clean. Filming over two days may sabotage this as the weather may be different, there will be different people in the shop and things that were in the shop the day before (coke cans, cereal boxes etc) may not be in there the next day, diminishing the continuity completely.

Shot List

• POV of the five pound note, looking up to the hand as he/she takes the note out of their wallet
• Close up of piggy bank getting smashed / close up of hand reaching into the jar
• Over the shoulder shot of the fiver getting handed over
• POV of a little kid holding the fiver and then switching to a POV of the fiver to show the child's facial expression
• Close focus of the fiver on a living room desk but still can see the background where the family are arguing over bill payments
• Close up of five pound note getting blown away
• Close up of the fiver dropped on the ground
• Wealthy business man / woman gets handed two five pound notes and complains because he wants a tenner instead. (over the shoulder)
• POV of the five pound note as the till shuts
• As man takes a big wallet of cash out, the five pound note gets dropped
• Tracking shot of the teen walking with the five pound note
• Close up of the money being put into a wallet
• Long shot of the homeless person sleeping with the five pound note
• Close up of the wallet in the jeans whilst walking
• Medium shot of the note being between shopkeeper and stranger (so that the shots are significant and is iconic to the film)
• POV of the homeless person as he selects what magazine he wants
• Time lapses of the homeless person as he holds the five pound note.

Storyboard (Click to enlarge)

A rough draft of our script for the voiceover

Section 1

Blimey I’ve been in here for ages. It’s doing my nut in. This pig is gassed up. I need to get out of here, can’t take it. What’s this, who’s this, what’s going on? (Piggy bank smashes) 

Fresh air. God i miss this. Err wait don’t touch me with your jammy hands. FINE here we go! Looks like I’ve got no choice, story of my life come on then you chylimida infested yout. Take me away!
You know what I’ve been doing this for nearly 27 years and I’m getting fed up, Mary Jane messed head up. That’s the problem with these teenagers complain about money but yet blow it on anything, and following all these political movements yet none of them are able to vote – eddiuts. Alright alright crisps will do. 

No not again. Argh hate this place. Cash tills are hell. Always have a stuck up 50 thinking he’s the godfather of Santander some sort of Arabian prince -  ha Get out of here. I’ll show him whose boss.


Section 2
Women – Can I have 20 silk cuts purple.

Fiver – Could get a change jobby here. Yes, do hope the bloke don’t throw a few coopers in. All rite here we go.

Women – Sorry but like do you have a five pound note this one’s really dirty and kinda crinkled.

Fiver – Bloody hell shes got some cheek. Not having it. I’ve been with tones of business women and there all the same.... Stuck up, always doing something fishy. Ahaha ya get me bud.
well I tell ya she got smooth hands could be useful. Woo I’m on fire today. Gosh calm down love stop running, oii mate watch out, easy, slow down, steady on, im slipping...


NOTE FALLS OUT OF HER HAND


Section 3
Fuckin hell that killed. Gonna jack up on some pain killers go all cobain on it. Arrr balls that nitty over there is staring at me, come of it don’t come over here. Tramps are the worst type of owners all they do is keep you in there rough diseased hands. God look at those gloves holes and all. Might spend on something warm or the usual white star to get piss’d.

PRODUCTION SCHEDULE - (click to enlarge)