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.