The Main Task

Members in our Group:

Michelle Pescatore
Yazid Jamaaoui
Daniel Samaan

 (Skip to 1:47) 

My original plan for my short-film was for it to be sport based and about a young boy who wants to leave school and chase his dreams to play a sport and it was originally to show how he worked for it and how made it to where he wants to be. When it actually came to the making of the Short-Film I thought of better ideas to use and this is when I decided I wanted it to be about lying and hiding the truth in order for other people to not laugh at you and I thought it was an improvement from this Story line because it was something people go through every single day and it would have been a more interesting story with a plot twist instead of a more mainstream one where the ending is more obvious. 

Creating a Short Film

Firstly, this is the first time I have ever worked on creating a Short Film. However I do have some experience using the equipment from my AS course. The equipment which I used were things such as a Tascam DR-05 voice recorder and software like Audacity in which I have a good amount of experience using and working on. I have had a few film ideas but I have never attempted to turn it into an actual Short Film so it is going to be a whole new experience for me. My group and I plan on making 2 Short Films so we are able to cut down on mistakes and make it as interesting as possible.

Using new equipment and editing software.

This is the first short film I created using the new equipment which I have never used before. It was a difficult task near the beginning because it was hard getting used to how to use the equipment and how to use it and get accurate and good quality shots. It was also difficult getting different types of shots as neither of the people in my group had any experience using a camera like the one we used to shoot this short film.

When we edited this we also used software that we were not very familiar with and it took us time to get used to it and understand how to use it and manage to edit the clip the best we can from what we learnt on the new editing software.

Storyboard

1)                                                                                 2)

This is our groups (YMD Productions) Storyboard for our 5 minute production which is called The Deceit. The Storyboard number one shows the main two characters sitting on a bench which is the main scene for our short film because it sets the tone for what the rest of the short film is going to be about. In this storyboard you can see that there are some annotations because it makes it clear to us of what we need to remember to do in terms of shot type and angle. By doing these annotations it helps us understand what is going to happen in each scene. In the second storyboard it tells us about each character and what will be happening when the characters are on the bench and how they are feeling. which is what our short film is about, hiding feelings and not telling anyone. 

This is the script for the first 90 second short film we created, The Deceit:

First Draft of Short Film (The Deceit) 

In this short 90 second or so film, it was our first draft at trying to get out production together and to get an idea of what we need to improve on for our 5 Minute short film. One conclusion we came to is that we need to have better actors in order to be able to perform the scenes and shots better. This clip shows some errors in which we need to make sure not to repeat in our 5 Minute short film and some errors include looking at the camera and noises not being picked up and sometimes outside noise being picked up. As this was our first Short-Film we knew we made a lot of mistakes and we also knew that there was a lot we could have done to improve on it, so we decided to show a few people and get there feedback. This is what they had to say about our first draft:

Audience Feedback and what I have learnt from it: 
Audience Feedback is very important because without getting feedback we will not be able to say if our Short-Film is good enough or if it needs improvements. When we get people to view our Short-Film and get their feedback it enables us to make more improvements and make our Production better and more professional. I have learnt that the audience may not understand the young "slang" language so we decided that we were going to do something about it. In our second Edit we tried to keep the language the same just a little bit more simple for people to understand but we still managed to keep the slang as well as making it simple and understandable.



This is the second attempt at the Short film that my group and I have attempted to do. We tried to listen to feedback that we got on the previous video and try to improve it more. The first obvious improvements are the different location and the fact we have changed actors. We decided to change actors because we thought that we could find people who knew what they were doing and were familiar with the settings and atmosphere they were in. The actors that we chose spoke the way they normally would when they are with their friends, which is why we felt they would be suitable to take part in this Short-Film. Another change is the ending scene compared to the first attempt. We tried to make it more clear as to what the Short-film is about and this helped us with the creation of our poster.

This Feedback was possibly one of the most important ones we received back from our viewers because it helped us improve the beginning of our Short-Film which gives it a completely different feeling. The way we started our short-film is unique and not yet been used until we decided to put it in. The beginning scene sets up the rest of the short-film very well.

This is our final version of our short film The Deceit. In this final version we used all the audience feedback that we had received from comments and some interviews we had taken from letting other people watch our second draft of the short film in order to create this last and final version. Many changes have been made, for example instead of using the location as the opening shot we decided based on feedback that it would be better to use images of our characters and then move straight into the first scene. We also agreed as a group that this would be the better decision because people would enjoy it more if they saw images of all the actors before the short film started and so that they become familiar with the scenery quicker than if they just saw the scenery of the park. 

Evaluating our Short-Film: 

The opening scene of our short film shows several pictures of our actors, this was purposely done because we felt it would be a better opening than just having the scenery shot. At the end of the pictures we leave it as our two main characters and having a close up of their hands, before the screen turns white and straight into the short-film. This was much better for our short-film because we got an opportunity to show our characters bonding and showing that they are comfortable around each other.   We made this decision based on Feedback we got from our Video. During our Short-Film past the minute mark we have a selection of 14 different shots within 22-24 seconds, this was purposely done as we did a close up shot of the characters that were speaking then back to a shot of three, to get all the reactions, then we went back to a close up of one character then again back to a three shot of all the characters to get all their reactions. 

A big role in our Short-film is the use of slang. It was important that we used these slang words because we are trying to make it as realistic as possible, and this is the way our characters usually talk which is why we planned to put slang words such as "sidechick" which means a girl on the side. Our Short Film used the codes and conventions very well as we had a plot twist which wasn't expected from the two characters because they are supposedly seen as "Gangsters" and the stereotype is that they do not have any problems as the ones seen in our short-film. 

From the screenshot above, you can see that it took some time to edit this Short-Film together. The image on the right is one of the best shots we took for this short-film and it took us a while to edit it correctly in order to make sure that it looked good when the other scenes came in. On the left was our First scene shot before we decided to change it and make it into images of our characters which was challenging codes and conventions of Short-Film. 

One of our original plans was to start the short film with a close up of a phone playing music and this was then changed into a scenery shot before we finally changed it to images of our characters which at the end we thought it was one of the best creative decisions we had made to improve the Film. 

Post Production Vlog

This is our Post Production Vlog which me and my team member Michelle made on Camtasia. This is an update on where we are currently on our production of the 5 minute short film. In this Vlog you will also see that we discuss the difficulties we came across when we first started the production. We felt it was important to talk about these difficulties to show that we have learnt from the mistakes we have made and improved to work more efficiently with less mistakes. We also discuss our characters and why we chose them and why the location we chose was important to the characters. The reason we picked our location (Paddington Recreation Ground) was because our characters go there very often and they would feel comfortable acting somewhere in which they know very well.

Production Images

This image shows team member Michelle and Director of the 5 Minute short-film The Deceit explaining to two of our main Characters how they should execute the scene. It is very important that she does this because it means that they execute the scene better and the way that the script says it should be done. She directed this scene at night, which meant we had to use a light at night so the shot was of good quality. We chose to shoot at night because it makes the scene look more realistic and as the characters are meant to act as if they are 'Gangsters' we thought it would be more realistic if they were out till late at night and we filmed then to make it seem as real as possible.

 As you can see from the picture, we were recording when it got dark because we were trying to show that our characters had a lot of time to spend with each other when the extras left, but we found it extremely difficult to get good recordings because the wind blowing and sometimes rain, which prevented us from adding a tiny touch of realism. After a few nights of recording we eventually decided that we were better off recording normally during the day.

In order for us to actually record scenes we needed a lot of help and we managed to find volunteers looking to help us. As the picture shows we needed light in order to record in the night. Luan De Jesus is helping us with the recordings in this picture and makes an appearance in our Short-Film as one of the main extras.