Wednesday 14 March 2012

Self Evaluation for DP2: Moving Image Project

The main ideas I was trying to express in this piece of work was that the main character 'Andy' is a normal guy working a normal job going about his day to day life and he was reasonably happy even if it was monotonous work, and that the character of Vinnie arrives and disrupts his life and eventually leads him (Andy) to snap. The ways I tried to represent this in my piece was that in the beginning of the film the sun is still up and the scenes are much lighter and brighter. This is also shown through the music and the slower calmed cuts between shots. However when Vinnie arrives the viewer knows immediately that something is wrong. The music changes to a darker tenser ambience, and the sun goes down making the whole scene dark and eerie. There is also the fact that as far as sound goes, Vinnie's arrival cuts through Andy happy existence as much as the loud thudding, electronic dubstep he is blaring out of his car cuts across the light-hearted acoustic music of the opening scene. This point is further pressed when Vinnie steps out of the car and the cans fall to the floor crating sharp high sounds, wrecking Andy's peaceful silence and the gentle hum of traffic below.
When developing my ideas I used a lot of research methods, including looking at existing film and comparing and contrasting different takes on classic literature, as well as reading about places and people that I could use as influences in my work.
Another method I used, for character design in particular, was to start from the beginning with the most basic ideas and themes, creating brainstorms of the characters based on what their histories might be and possible motives driving them to act the way they do in the film.
A problem I found while editing was that the sound of the dialogue was at times too quiet to hear, this was due to the fact that the actors were talking too quietly or that the mic was too far away from them. I attempted to rectify this by making the sound levels higher at these points, but there’s only so much you can do in an edit and by making the sound levels higher overall I was also increasing the background noise, making cuts between shots painfully obvious. I realise that the problem was that the microphone was not close enough to the actors and so did not pick up enough sound. The best way to fix this would have to be a retake, or for the actors to rerecord those lines exactly as they said them in the shot and layer them over, making them loud enough to hear.
I think if I was going to redo this project, I’d defiantly acquire better lighting equipment, perhaps take to a couple of those personal lights or use the car headlights on full beam in more shots. I would also spend more time making sure the props were better positioned. Another thing I'd do would be to spend more time learning how to use other equipment better, when it came to filming days I felt a tad useless as I wasn't very helpful setting things up like the sound or camera equipment.

No comments:

Post a Comment