I confirm that the work on this website is entirely my own and does not include any work completed by anyone other than myself, except where clearly stated otherwise, the sources, appropriately referenced.
22/03/2022
I feel that I have made sufficient progress in developing my idea. The only thing really keeping me from writing up both the script and more fleshed out elements of my concept is the research I want to do. I decided relatively early on that I wanted to watch a number of film-noirs, westerns and anthologies all the way through to get a really good understanding of the codes and conventions of each genre and that I wouldn't begin writing until I had looked at all of them - at the time of writing, I've watched around half of the films I wanted to look into. So subsequently, I've made minimal progress in working on the actual content of my story any further than a detailed outline. The research I have looked into though, has really helped me to inform and expand upon my concept. Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man has been a big source of inspiration, giving me indicators into my sound design, certain shot compositions in certain scenes and transitioning between them. I will be spending the rest of the week gathering my research so that I can start Pre-Production.
28/03/2022
This week, I'm primarily focusing on my Pitch ready for next week, which will hopefully give me a boost in confidence about my project. I'm by no means feeling unsure about it, things are just moving slowly for me as I want to be as thorough as I possibly can be and now that I have researched most of the films I wanted to look into, I feel that I can deliver a confident Pitch making sound judgements informed from my sources of inspiration. I feel it's going to be difficult to try and present this anthology because of how each story differs from one another, the room may think I'm lacking clarity when in reality, I simply haven't fleshed it out in my pitch because I haven't fleshed it out anywhere else. This being said though, I believe that I have done enough at this current stage to effectively convey my idea, where I'm going with it and how I'm going to achieve certain things. In broader terms of the project itself, I finalised locations and actors this week ready to start shooting in the second week of half-term, which is a big weight off my mind. Now that this is done, pitch aside, I'll be able to focus on writing my script next week, with my sources of inspiration at my disposal, I can hopefully write a solid first draft.
05/04/2022
This week was pitching week and I felt that I did really well. I delivered a clear, confident, thought out pitch that effectively conveyed my ideas to the room. I wanted to be as clear as possible with the media texts that inspired this project, and even though I'm bound to expand upon that the more I watch, read etc, I think I achieved what I set out to do. My biggest criticism was the lack of clarity of the mercenary and preacher characters. A problem, because the mercenary will likely have the most screen time out of all the characters, but at the time, not all of the characters were fully fleshed out and I didn't want to put something in my pitch that I wasn't happy with 100%. And since I also began to write the script this week, I have a much better idea of both characters and their roles and influence in the story. I need to maintain my message throughout and be as concise as possible with each story. In terms of where to go next with my research, I want to look over a few films with similar plots, themes and characters, so to back up a subsequent draft of the script, I will be looking into Chinatown(1972) and Blue Velvet(1986). I'm undecided on whether to do a test shoot as there is no particular technique I want to employ that I can't do on-set. If I do, it will likely only be screen-tests for costumes, and/or characters.
12/04/2022
Production begins next Monday and I am right on track. I finished the first draft of my script last week and will have a final draft complete by the end of this week, along with my storyboards. All of my actors and locations are still locked in place, so I'm feeling good about starting in the next few days. The only thing I've really been unsure of is the third story with the photographer character. While it does have a nice mystery beat relating to the bear, the content of the scene, I don't feel matches the Neo-Noir/Western genre in any way and by leaving it in, I run the risk of muddying the water, so to speak and I really want my vision to be apparent, rather than an occasional substitute. So aside from this, I'm feeling very confident in what I've made so far and what I will be making next week. I bought everything I need for his film this week - props, costume etc. and the simple fact that I've gone as far as to put substantial effort into these aspects already puts my mise en scene and visual diversity above all of my other projects, and im confident the rest of the production will follow the same path.
23/04/2022
I wrapped production tonight. I started on Monday with the very first scene and it was an excellent decision to start with this scene, because it immediately got me off to a good start. I've worked on a number of film projects and I have never had a successful first day of shooting as well as that one. It instantaneously secured my confidence in the project, from the lighting of the scene, the production design and the action, without being preemptive, I think it's one of the best things I've made since I began making films. The next day, my arrangements shifted to Thursday and so I had time to think about the photographer scene that was bothering me and I decided that I was going to cut it, because it was the only part that just wasn't gelling and I felt so good about the day before, I was confident in thinking that by cutting it, the entire project would live up to the success of that first day. And while shooting, I believe it did. Wednesday rolled around and we shot my scene - The Preacher scene - and it was complicated, arduous and difficult to orientate as the area seemed particularly populated that day, but I came away with exactly the shots and performance I wanted. And then shooting the final scene on Thursday and the uber scene today, which both went excellently too, came out looking exactly how envisioned, it just, simply put, confirmed my faith in the project. I just need to make sure to keep up with this in conjunction with my website as I'm now starting to fall behind on that.
28/04/2022
This week is the first week back from half term and as of today, I've only had one day worth of editing. My biggest takeaway from what I have edited however, is just how good the footage looks from a technical standpoint. It's not wild, I'm not pulling off super advanced, complicated camera movements, but the colours, framing and composition of the shots I have gathered look great. I am around half way through editing the first scene and I feel my vision starting to come together. However, there are caveats to this, the biggest of which being the inferable runtime. Originally, I thought my film would wind up being around 5-7 minutes long, but as I started writing, I knew that I needed time to establish these characters and that I didn't want to speed a scene along for the sake of meeting a runtime, but now I have the footage and given the rested runtime of what I've already done, it'll likely be closer to 10 minutes. I will be working on putting together a rough cut across the next two weeks, hopefully booking a Zoom Recorder the week after next to capture my audio. In term's of my website however, I'm still falling behind and I don't know why. I just don't think I'm balancing my time very well and it's putting me off writing anything down. I have all the theory, its just not present on my website. So that'll be something I work on in the following weeks too.
03/05/2022
Now that I have a very rough assembly cut stitched together, I feel I can now adequately judge all of the footage I have captured. In terms of framing and composition, for the most part, it's exactly how I envisioned. With a few minor changes from the storyboards to being on-set and capturing something that I previously hadn't thought to capture, for what I wanted to achieve, it's spot on. The use of camera techniques is perhaps lacking though. While I did think about using some crash zooms to accentuate that classic western feel, they never came to pass. About the only camera technique that consistently used was a tracking shot, though that's nothing grand. I don't feel like this is an enormous problem though. I wanted the film to seem unsuspecting on the surface, but once you actively engage in the content, you realise it's not, kind of like an allegory for the bear itself, and so I wasn't going to force any wild camera techniques into it just for the sake of having them. The lighting is the big sell though. This is my first experience properly lighting a film and it did not let me down. There are multiple shots that look stunning (without colour correction), and while there is some slight lighting continuity issues, the lighting of every scene, to me, comes off as very stylised and stellar and it definitely gives me an edge on my final project. I'm very proud of how this film looks and feels and in conjunction with the mise en scene, such as the cupcake and the costume of each character, it really captures that weird, wild wackiness I was going for. In broader terms of how the whole thing looks in a timeline, it's long. There's no getting away from it, it's long - at the moment, 12 minutes with credits - but I'm confident in saying that it's a very good 12 minutes. It's not long for the sake of being long, the story, I feel, warrants it's length. The content itself, I am very proud of. It almost exactly came out how I wanted it, down to the visuals, symbolism and overall feel. No scene feels bloated or overdone, it really captures what I wanted to achieve. Moving forward though, I need to work on more than just an assembly cut. At the same time, I will capture my foley and work on my score and hopefully, by next week, I can start to focus on a concise, full cut. My website still needs work too. I made a bit of progress, but nowhere near enough. I'm missing huge chunks of my context and research and I can't let it carry on, so after I get my audio done, I'm going to focus my efforts on my website in my downtime.
10/05/2022
Over the weekend, I began working on my sound. I booked out a Zoom Recorder and comprised a list of everything I would need, which was quite a lot. While putting together my rough cut, not only did it come to the conclusion that all of my sound captured by the camera wasn't good enough, but I also needed to dub most of the lines. And so by the end of Sunday night, I had captured 182 audio clips to use that I thought were pretty good. Monday rolled around and I worked on the sound for the bulk of the first scene - The Dinner - and while it fit brilliantly, there's still a lot of work to be done. My plan is to spend this week working on my audio and by Thursday, hopefully completing it so I can move on to colour mixing the following week. I think this is definitely doable, but it will require me to work not only in the lessons, but outside of them too. There's still a few pieces of audio that I'm missing, such as The Preacher monologue dub - The Execution - and certain engine sounds in the second scene - The Uber - but none of which will be difficult to do. In terms of the grade my project sits at currently, I don't think it's at a very high standard and that is for one main reason - my research. My Context and Research page is currently lacking enormously. I have all the theory, I've done all of the research, It's just not on my website. It seems to be a little bit of a mental block for me, something I just can't get passed and I don't really know why. But I'm going to work to get it all up together this week and by next week, I can hopefully give an adequate assessment of my project that will hopefully be at a much higher standard than it is currently. Like I said previously, this week I will also be focusing on my sound so that i can work on producing a final project in the penultimate week of the deadline.
17/05/2022
The deadline is next week and I've made a lot of progress. I now have an intermediate final cut of my film, still needing some audio tweaking and missing colour grading completely, but an adequate cut, no less. It really is shaping up to be the best film I've made since I got into filmmaking and it's really gratifying. I think I've reached the stage where my skill has caught up with my ambition, because I've always been ambitious, but my skill hasn't always matched that and I think this is the first project where both aspects are rather equal. There's still a sizeable amount of work to be done, but I feel that the worst of it is over. In terms of my website, I've all but caught up. My context and research page is now complete, aside from a small section on the screening reaction that I can't fill in until next week when we screen our films on the Wednesday, and I feel it's at a higher standard to all f my work on the other units of the first year of this course, so I'm very pleased with that. My Practical Skills still needs filling in now that I'm close to finishing my edit, and I need to focus on my edit more than I ever have been previously now that the deadline is fast approaching. But overall, I feel better about the project than I have been. I've also received feedback from all of my lecturers and they all say the same thing, which is that the audio needs work, which I completely agree with, and it will be focused on more than anything else.
Final Evaluation
Over the last 2 months, I have been developing a creative media product to conclude the first year of the Level 3 TV and Film course. A final project, no less, intended to compile every piece of information, skill and technical knowledge I have learnt, been exposed to and adopted over the last six months and channel it into one, concentrated, larger-scaled production. The precedent that was established to us detailed that this production could be anything (within reason) that we wanted; a short film, a music video, or on a more obscure note, perhaps even a corporate advertisement, if we really wanted to, so long as it abided by a very simple, loose stimulus - change. Intended for us to derive meaning from it on our own, in different ways, this word was the catalyst for our final projects. Whether we interpreted the word as physical change, money or the philosophical event that every competent story must go through - change, every perception was valid, it just had to be our jumping off point. I began thinking about what I may want to do for this final project in the half-term prior to the start of this unit, and being given the brief only launched me further into that wild thought process. I, as a filmmaker, have always had a love for the strange, the sinister, the ambiguous and the superstitious and I continue to form stories around this stricture, but putting a new spin on it each time, the more knowledge and skill acquire, and this project in particular, I feel has been a defining moment for me. I started with a very simple object - a stuffed teddy bear - and built a world around it. A world where everyone is a dreadful person, a world of strangeness, sinisterness, ambiguity and superstition that all stem from this one innocuous item. Taking cues from David Lynch’s work, his love of duality, mystery and weirdness, I created a film that was entirely unique as a standalone production, blending the Neo-Noir and Western genre together to accentuate the characters I created - Jim the Mercenary, The Gangster, The Preacher and the biggest of them all, the blue bear, how they feel about each other and the world they live in. As the story descends through each character, change is presented as a consistent pariah. The change in ownership of the bear, the change in their philosophical ideals, the deeper inferable theme of socio-economic change, all of these things contributed to the complexity, and by extension, the quality of my final project. As I was shooting it in mid April, I was consciously aware that it was unlike anything I had ever done before. The costume design, the writing, the production design, the lighting, the cinematography and my ability to give each one of them meaning that fed back into what I was trying to achieve, what I was trying to say was an experience I’ve never had before. It was all very out-there, in your face and pulpy and that confidence came directly from my understanding of the material I was researching. While I definitely could’ve gone into more depth at some points with my research into media texts, perhaps deconstructing the Neo-Noir and the Western genre to gage a deeper understanding of how the two of them worked, and how they could work in conjunction with one another, the lack of elaboration on aspects such as this actually helped emphasise the mystery of the story that was being presented. While I am definitely acknowledging this as a flaw, potentially missing out on the opportunity to create an even sharper contrast between the two genres and subsequent making it even more unique, the lack of clarification fed back into the strangeness, sinisterness ambiguity, and superstition that the bear, the causal factor of the conflict in the story, entailed. This mystery, this deliberate withdrawal of information is present in every scene and the colour blue, is used as a vessel by which to convey that. The bear is blue, The Gangster’s suit is blue, The Preacher’s car is blue, the lighting in both of The Mercenary’s scenes contrasts blue and orange. This kind of attention to detail communicated through production design, lighting and editing is something that I was previously aware of how to do, but I had never actually done it before this project. And by the time I had finished shooting, the sense of achievement I felt was still somewhat missing, until I started working on a cut. The editing room is definitely where it all came together for me. Seeing the bear encapsulate the bounds of a 4:3 aspect ratio, and seeing how every other character seemed so small in comparison due to the way I framed them, how the light bounced off of them and the things they chose to say was where I started to find that sense of achievement. While the post-production phase was incredibly tumultuous, leaving me barely enough time to breathe between the time it exported and the time it was shown to a classroom full of 30-odd people, I spend every second thoroughly analysing every frame to make sure it was the best I could possibly make it, making sure it kept the tone synonymous with Blue Velvet, the colour palette synonymous with Drive, and the replication of the etherial minefield of Neil Young’s Dead Man score at the ears of the audience as they watched all these other things transpire on screen. That, that is what I’m most proud of about this project, my ability to incorporate all these ideas, cherrypick all these wonderful aspects of other films and use them as inspiration to funnel into a product that, at the end of the day is mine, has my own personal imprint and that I can say, I put blood, sweat and tears into. And I suppose the ironic thing about this, as much as I’m overjoyed at the quality of the final product, I can see myself being marked down. And I understand perfectly why that is, because, yeah, I could’ve gone into more depth with my research, I could’ve devised other methods of research, I coddle tightened up my audio, worked on a more balanced sound mix to demonstrate technical flare and devising solutions to problems, there’s not really any apparent editing or camera technique that’s used in this film, but rather, what there is of it is understated and done in such a way to lend subtext, complexity and layering to the final piece, rather than making those technical flourishes superficial and banal. Camera techniques like the Whip-Pan or the Rack Focus can be done excellently, with meaning and purpose, but I don’t feel that they had any place in my film and I didn’t want to compromise what my film was to service something like that. At the end of the day, I made the film I wanted to make, probably 98% how I envisioned it and now I’m left feeling incredibly proud. I just hope I’ve done enough to warrant that same approval from my higher-ups. Whatever the outcome, I’m still incredibly proud of what I was able to make, and I’m eternally grateful to my peers and to my lecturers for helping me to get the that stage. I think to go from a 20 second continuity editing practice of someone tying their shoes to an 11 minute Neo-Noir/Western centring around a MacGuffin that’s used as a device to establish the motivations of three horrendously bad people is an enormous jump for anyone to make in the space of 6 months.