For our film genre, our group decided to pick a thriller/drama. We chose this because our members were overall familiar with the general conventions involved in thrillers and we had already watched a few of examples in class. These included “Get Carter”, “Run Lola Run” and “Brick”. The plot of our film is going to be about a few members who represent syndicates who proceed to a drug trade. We found it particularly easy in planning for props and pre-production in story boarding for this genre. This was because the costumes were already present to us as our group members normally were already wearing urban/scruffy clothing. These included leather coat/jackets and ripped jeans which we remember from “Run Lola Run”. As for the props we required only a bootleg for the drugs which could be a wrap of tinfoil or plastic sheets. The most essential prop were the fake guns we needed so we could utilize it for traders so we can capture the killing scene. Overall, the planning for our props/costumes and soundtrack went pretty smoothly as we were all genuinely familiar with the genre and we all knew the exact demands.
My role as sound engineer was as simple to just provide a composed soundtrack and possibly voice work/sound effects. However, I needed to work closely to my two group members as not only were we they directors but Josh was also the main editor. I opted to be responsible for the sound because I was fully aware of the kind of tunes/music available from Garage band to compose a shaky provoking soundtrack to raise the tension towards the audience. Examples of these included Drones and Sci-texture which sounded very low pitched. I also had some relevant freeware SFX that would prove useful for the gunshot just to add that extra realism. For the filming, we all decided to keep the dialogue to a minimum. This was because of the weather conditions we had to contend with. Some of these conditions included windy shifts and a cold temperature which we realized began to hinder our performance.
When it came to editing stage, I decided to cut out the background noise for the clips that had no dialogue so I could focus on composing the soundtrack. However, one of the major drawbacks according to our feedback was the lack of soundtrack in our final cut. We did manage to finish a soundtrack for the rough cut which we had originally planned to use. But we ended up running into technical difficulties with the Macs being unable to transfer a copy via Memory stick yet alone export a new song from Garage band. This overall affected the final product with the scene seemingly having no atmosphere whatsoever. Another unfortunate encounter was the sound effects we lost. This is because the gun shots were imported from a memory stick (my own). Thus, it would have meant that I would have to bring it all the time unless I saved a copy into our group folder.
But due to the conflicts with our group being unorganised and absent from early stages. I ended up forgetting my role in bringing the SFX so I could concentrate on editing the main footage with our editor absent. After many sessions of experimenting, the earthquake filter came to our rescue. This visual effect allowed us to shake the canvas however we want so we could present a provoking and electrifying experience to viewers during the gun shot point of the bullet travelling. During the filming, we came across our camera being low in battery. This was due to a simple mistake where the camera was left on while we travelled to our location meaning we had to get it charged. However, this is also delayed our time in managing to complete our filming within the time we planned as we only had an hour left until it would get dark. Apart from the limited time, our battery was also low because we couldn’t afford to charge for a long duration.
This caused us to almost improvise some shots a long the way as we didn’t have the time to discuss and properly shoot the correct shots according to our list. One of our improvements was to improve the flow of our scene. To my understanding, this was partially due to the variety lack of shots that were available to us since most of our shots were quite long which may have caused our viewers to loose interest. Overall I believe our film could have been better in many ways. Our group had many concerns for being unorganised and inattentive with commitment. The pre-production stage early had gone well but post-production could have been a touch better had if all our members turned up for every lesson to finish editing. But I was still pleased to have resorted the gunshot issue by recording an artificial SFX and receivepositive feedback.
