Short Film Evaluation

Evaluation

During the planning stages of our short film, we considered the ideas of gambling and risk as we wanted to try and create a thriller. We came up with the idea of using a dice to decide a person’s life choices and how lucky they are depending on what number they roll. This was perfect as a starting point as it gave us a lot of options and paths to go down during the filming to truly showcase the events that could occur in someone’s life if this was a reality. 

As we had created the basic plot and style of the project, we began to think about locations. We wanted to stay away from usual locations that both of us had used before as we needed to create something unique and original. Therefore, we stayed close to my house and filmed within fields, large open areas, and by the sides of roads in order to make the film flow with other scenes involving a car. This was due to the fact that we filmed many shots showing the main character stealing a car because of rolls on the dice.

During filming there were a few problems we had to face. This ultimately caused us to rethink the filming of certain scenes and locations. The day when we wanted to film some exterior tracking shots of the car, we found that the A5 was very busy and wouldn’t allow the car to speed away quickly. Because of this, we decided to film around St Nicolas Park instead as it was a similar area and time of day to other sections of the film.

However, the majority of the filming stage went extremely smooth as we were able to collect the necessary shots in good time. The majority of the time, we followed the storyboard and kept to the script for voice overs. Ultimately, I think that we followed our plan quite effectively and the shots we had collected turned out better than I expected.

As we started to edit the separate parts of the short film, we pieced together necessary clips and began to cut the videos to the beat of the music we had chosen. Adding fade in and fade out effects, as well as speed interpolation and warp stabilisers to create an effective, professional look to the overall creation.

Once we started to import video clips and piece the film together in order, we began searching for music and audio that would impact the overall plot. My partner suggested some music by Ennio Morricone, who had created a lot of the classic Western movies’ soundtracks. This fit perfectly with our intro and we decided to carry it on throughout as a recurring theme in the short film.

Overall, I think that we created an effective thriller that has a clear narration. I personally think that the editing shows the environment very well and is cut at points which causes the film to flow perfectly.

We grabbed the ideas of quick editing and shot reverse shot from the short film ‘The Gunslinger’ that we watched in class to improve the impact of the film. This style of music and theme was carried over onto our final film and I think it was done so very well.