Short Film, The Making Of

Making this film took a lot of out of lesson hours and a lot of organisation.

The first thing we had to do was come up with a story set around the given brief, and create a storyboard showing the progression of the plot and noting possible shots.

Once the storyboard had been presented to the group and the selected to become the film, we arranged a meeting on the Monday to discuss the idea and write up a shot by shot plan of the sequence of events, including ideas for special effects that we could use on the shots and how the camera angles would affect the action.

After this we looked up footage of horror films on YouTube to get an idea of how other film makers had used sounds and effects in their work in order to get a reaction from the audience. These films included The Fourth Kind and Alien Sightings for the security footage, and Predator, for the Monster Vision.

The next thing we had to do was enlist actors and find locations to film. We got in contact with Phil nodding, and he agreed to be our police officer for the film, we also found two candidates to play the Woman, one was Krishna’s flatmate, a drama student, and one a Film student that I knew. Unfortunately, the drama student cancelled the day before the shoot, so I got in contact with the film student, and she told us that she was only available after 3pm, so in the end I ended up having to play the part.

Finding the locations to film was comparatively easy, the arboretum was used for the outdoor filming, and it so happened that there was a perfectly positioned bench for the woman to fall asleep on, surrounded by bushes, providing the monsters cover. And a room inside the Waverley building was the perfect size and shape for the interview room and was free all day after 12.

Another problem we encountered was that the member of our group tasked with writing the scripts hadn’t shown up to the planning meeting, and so he didn’t know about the changes made to the plot, so I wrote a backup script in case the script he had made was inaccurate. As it turned out he didn’t show up for the actual filming either, and so the backup scripts became the only scripts.

During the filming the man we had playing ‘Man with dog’, Edgar, was only available until 2pm, so we had to film all of his parts in the morning, before meeting up with Phil at 12 to film the interviews. We were also lucky in that a passing woman was kind enough to lend us her dog for the film.

Editing the footage took three days in total, the first day was spent organising the shots, getting them cut down to the full length and put in the right order. The second day was used to add in the camera effects and shot transitions, the most difficult part of which was creating the monster vision effect in Adobe Photoshop and importing it into Adobe premiere, because this took over an hour to render. On the third day I took the full length video and cut it down to the bare minimum trying to keep the story, as in the brief, the film had to be three to five minutes long.

The bit I like most about the video is the end, because it had to speak to a singer song writer to get the song that played at the credits made specifically for this film.