Looking Back To Go Forward

As I begin to plan for my A2 short film, I must first look back at my work from last year in my previous AS blog:

Pre-Production:
For my previous work, I planned out my opening by first thinking up my story as a whole and what the whole film would be about and how it would run. This would then allow me to envisage what the opening would be and how it would set up the rest of the film. This method I found worked very well in the way I could then construct an opening for the whole film.
Casting I found the most difficult as out in rural Wymondham there is very little acting talent which I know of to choose from, thus I found myself relying heavily upon favours from friends to act out in the opening. Thus, the acting quality, while sufficient, wasn't as good as it could be. So for the new short film, I will endeavour to search further afield for more professional actors to star and this will hopefully improve dramatically the appearance and performance of the film.
Script I feel I excelled in in terms of use of technology and professional technique. I researched script software and eventually used Adobe Story. A professional online software used to script every part of film, from character profiles to filming schedules. Thus, I was able to produce a professional looking script and was far easier for my actors to understand the role of the characters they were playing.
Storyboarding I was fairly new too and had always relied before upon maintaining the visual shots in my head. I found it a struggle to narrow down the shots I wanted to shoot and to articulate those shots into a single drawing. Thus for this years work, I will try to find a more effective means of showing my shot diagrams. I have already searched for online storyboarding software and currently there are a few which have flagged up
Scheduling filming I found easy to organise, however actors would often give wrong dates or mis-leading times that they were available, thus it was a little squeezed into the time we had to film. This year, I intend to plan far in advance so to avoid these struggles and to hold people down to a set date.
Location settings were fairly easy to find as I based my idea around the facilities readily available to me, thus finding and booking the use of these locations was extremely easy and worked extremely well.

Production:
Filming turned out to be easier than I expected. All the actors responded well to my criticisms and instructions and the process was extremely quick.
Lighting wasn't great on most occasions, but this was only due to lack of equipment to improve this. Since then I have now invested in a set of photosel lights which will serve to light any setting which I require.
Directing for me is a skill I'm very new to so was a real experience in controlling actors and instructing them to follow the script but also taking on board their suggestions. I feel with more experience I will become more accomplished at it and thus more able to handle more and more actors.

Post-Production:
For editing the video, I used apple's iMovie. I was very accomplished with this software as I had used it in many other videos I had done before so the choice was simple. However, for this years production, I have decided to upgrade to apple's Final Cut Pro as it offers far more video editing capabilities and with far more powerful processors to enable faster editing of larger video files.
The audio of the opening wasn't great as I hadn't at that point discovered the use of boom microphones so I relied heavily on the audio captured from the camera itself. Thus, while the dialogue was discernable, it could have been far better in quality. Since then, I have built my own boom microphone and thus will use it in the new short film to capture even better audio. Which, if you improve the audio, audiences are 30% more likely to watch the video if the audio is good but the video quality is terrible.
Soundtrack had similar problems, I only had access to apple's Garage band to develop the soundtrack for the film, which for entry level filming is suitable. However, for a more professional film, software such as Logic Pro is more suited as it has far greater editing capabilities, sound banks and development options to choose from and thus I have bought the software to boost the quality of my films.

The areas I believe I have gained the most marks are in my planning stages and in my post-production as these are the areas I feel most confident and familiar in and thus feel I can do a far better job in these areas.
Areas I believe I have lost marks are in the quality of filming and my ability to choose/control actors, as while I believe I can control actors to a degree, my choice may not have been the most suitable and the quality of acting could still be improved.

Targets to improve:

• Use better methods of capturing media, such as better camera, lighting and audio capture
• Select better, more experienced actors to play in the film
• Provide better soundtrack more suitable and professional sounding parts.