An example of dramatic piano music to create an effect to show that it is a tense moment is above.

When Simon takes Elina into the stock room to make a picnic for Elina I think

After feedback from our lecturers we have agreed that this works better that having it drag on, that way at the start Marek and Elina are both introduced. At the end of the film there is going to be a shot of Simon left in the aisle of Costcutter, the camera then zooms out showing that he has been rejected, with another shot of Elina walking away.

I have been looking at different types of music for the film and have decided that in some parts the sound of a piano would work.

At the start of the fil

Updated to include the new title. I experimented with other images but decided this was the one that suited the film best.

The pace of a drama is very important. Dramas such as this tend to be quite slow paced and have long lasting shots of the surroundings. As we can see in this short there are a few shots of the camera simply travelling down an isle of the shop. If the pace is too fas then it gives of the conventions of an action/thriller. Dramas, especially UK dramas such as ‘About a Girl’ tend to have that gritty realism edge to them. Often low saturation colours and long shots depict a morbid mise-en-scene which revolves around the main characters life. Establishing that a short film is a drama is done quite quickly through the tone of the piece and how the characters interact. Slow conversations and monotonous routines of life such as going to work are often signs of a drama, as they are as highly realistic to every day life.

Dramas can have different elements to them as well such as a surreal take on a routine (like the freezing of time) or the encoperation of other genres such as comedy. Comedy in dramas can work quite well, especially in rom-coms. Our piece pulls from a small amount of comedy, but only enough to break the tension in the scene and to make it reflect what would really happen in real life in the situation. As IMDB states “A dramatic film shows us human beings at their best, their worst, and everything in-between” This can all be said to be true of our short, as we see human beings at their best (making a picnic for a girl he loves). Their worst (the abusive boyfriend, Marek) and everything in-between (the working out of how to approach Elina and tell her his feelings). I think that our short does well in encompassing all the different elements of a good drama, and that we have understood and completed our piece well for the genre we are representing.

Editing software

An important detail  that we didn’t think too carefully about was the format of the video files that we have filmed on the JVCs. There are two options on the camera’s settings: mp4 or quicktime format , and our group mate Gergana suggested it was better to choose mp4 instead of quicktime, as this type of files would be compatible with macs and PCs as well.  Her intention was good, because she  wanted to  make sure we can work with the footage on our PCs , in case the Macs would  not available. But there is one thing that none of us thought about: Final Cut recognises only quicktime files, and not mp4. We could have  converted our files , but we considered it is better not to do it, as it would have been a big waste of time and the high quality of the footage would have been lost as well. So  we have decided to edit our film in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.

First steps

Before we even begun editing,  I started to visualise a possible version of our film in my  mind , thinking of what shots we could use. Then  me and G have discussed , just to make sure we both have a clear sense of  how the video  is going to look like.

We did keep log sheets when filming, but because it was the first time when we’ve used the JVCs  for a  proper shooting, the camera operators forgot to keep a record of the  memory cards they have used , so the log sheets were not too helpful  later on, in the post production stage.

When going through the footage, firstly I started to rename all the clips by their content, and then I have organised everything in different folders, representing different scenes of the film. Meantime, Gergana started to drag all the files in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and to organise them by their names into separate bins.  Once the footage has been sorted,  we started to watch all the takes from each scene, trying to decide which one is better. We have also started to get rid of unnecessary footage and rename clips, depending on the  position of the camera, on how good the acting or the lighting was.  We didn’t care too much about the sound, as we knew that we’ve got separate files with all the sound.

As Dancyger  states in his book , ‘The editing  process can be broken into two stages:  the stage of assembling the shots into a rough cut and  the stage in which the editor and the director  fine tune or pace the rough cut transforming it into a fine cut.’

So we first  started to work on our assemble edit, by dragging clips onto the timeline and put them in a very rough order based on your pre-production paperwork, such as  the  storyboard  and the shot list. At this stage,  we didn’t add any transitions on our  video and sound clips. We just arranged the cuts in a decent order because we  wanted to see if there is a story in there and if we can actually make a film from the footage we had. And we had indeed. The film was in there, but it was quite  hard to follow the story. Also, the film was more than 10 min long, and even though this was just a rough cut, it was  far too long. So we have decided to eliminate some parts that were irrelevant to our story (e.g. simon coming in the store, simon serving eggs to a random customer, simon  swapping shifts with another worker). After doing this, the film started to make a bit more sense.

By getting rid of  footage, we  actually followed  a set of rules known as continuity editing. As our lecturer Clifton stated during one of our lecture, ‘continuity editing is a type of editing that gradually evolved from the beginning of cinema.’ Just as early filmmakers  discovered  in the past, we have realised that  we didn’t have to show absolutely everything in a narrative , in order to make it understood by the audience. On the contrary , by compressing time and leaving out certain events  that were not relevant to the story being told, we could produce a more dramatic narrative, that  could be even more appealing to the audience. And this is exactly what we did.

Feedback

After  showing our rough cut edit to our lecturers, we got some really helpful feedback:

• Always  choose to record in  quicktime format when setting up  a JVC. It is better to use Final Cut Pro when editing, as more support  can be provided from uni staff

This is definitely something that I won’t forget in the future and will always check before filming.

• ‘There are some beautiful shots  in there’

It was really nice to hear this,  because personally, I have noticed only the  flaws in our footage, such as bad angles of the camera, the camera movements,  the framing – missing parts of the shot, or bad acting , bad lighting, distorted sound.

• We have to make full use of footage that we have got instead of focusing too much on  the shots that don’t look nice, and maybe could be eliminated

A good example would be  our  initial, estabilising shot.  Our director Sam, wanted to have  a shot of the Costcutter sign outside the store,  zooming out and panning down on  a wide shot of the whole store, with Simon coming in the shot and getting inside the store. Unfortunately, all the takes of this first  shot  were  so  bad that we couldn’t use any of them. But do we really need this one particular shot? None of us really thought about that, until  one of our lecturer opened our eyes. We don’t really need to show that  our main character works  in Costcutter, or that the action takes place in a store, as it is bleeding obvious in all of the other shots that we have

• We need to be careful with the sound. The background noise in the original sound is too noisy. 

We have to start going through all the sound files that we have recorded on the Marantz and  see if these could work better. If not, we  may want to re-record all the  dialogue  in the TV studio , and then sync it with the original sound and also re-record  some plain  ‘shop’ noise that we could use in the background,  throughout the whole film.

• When starting to polish our rough cut, we need to pay attention to the continuity that results when two shots are juxtaposed.

This also reminds me of  Dancyger’s observation : ‘The second shot must have some relationship to the first shot to support  the illusion of continuity’ from one of his books, called ‘The technique of Film and Video Editing‘.

Another approach I will be taking is getting in contact with film reviewers and journalists. Reviewing the film may mean that we get some criticism, but it will still be a way to make our short more wildly known. I will first be approaching people who are on media courses that I know and getting them to write a review of it online. A cousin of mine writes for a Warwick based film-review magazine, so I’ll try and get him to take a look at our short. Of course putting our artefact online is the best way to reach an audience, and may even attract fans and distributers.

I came across this video entitled “How to distribute your indie film” which helps explain the ways in with distributors may get your film out there but will give you very little money. This really is no concern for us, as the man in the video said “Maybe only something like a few thousand dollars”. Where as that would be very nice, I do not think we will be making money from this short. Our only intention is to get our film out there and get it recognised and appreciated by a media audience.

I have found that contacting small independent distributers may be the best way forward for getting our short film out into the world. I will be in touch with them once our final piece has been completed. For now I have found a long list of UK and international based indepenand film distributors, which can be found here-http://www.independentfilmdistribution.com/?page_id=18. Another approach I will be taking is getting in contact with film reviewers and journalists. Reviewing the film may mean that we get some criticism, but it will still be a way to make our short more wildly known. I will first be approaching people who are on media courses that I know and getting them to write a review of it online. A cousin of mine writes for a Warwick based film-review magazine, so I’ll try and get him to take a look at our short. Of course putting our artefact online is the best way to reach an audience, and may even attract fans and distributers. Distributing our artefact will mean that our short will no longer be a university project but will now be a professional piece of work out there in the real world.

I was expecting to do a post on the odd few short film festivals that I have found that look suitable to send our film to, but after researching it seems that there are hundreds of them that look perfect for ours to be sent to! I feel that our best bet of being accepted is by sending out video off to short student film festivals such as Exposures and Screentest Festival. We will of course be branching out and submitting our piece to all other short film festivals around the globe, there’s no harm in trying! Our short falls under the category of ‘Drama’ and there seem to be a vast amount of festivals that accept that, as I imagine it’s one of the most common genres. After the piece has been edited and we have a film poster/DVD cover I will begin burning the DVDs and posting them off, and emailing them to those festivals which accept online submissions.

Below is a list of but a few festivals that would be appropriate to send our short too.

Websites such as Britfilms.co.uk have an extensive list of all UK film festivals, of which i’ve one through and found many that would be appropriate. There are also loads of international festivals which we could try and send our film too. I am feeling confident that we will be able to get our film into at least one festival, and as stated, our best shot is with student film festivals. Any festival we get our piece in will be a great achievement for us, and I’m excited at the prospect of starting to apply to all of these festivals.

The sound of the footage is really bad on some places. I can say most of it. Fortunately this is the sound on the cameras. We definitely had to pay attention to the right format on both of the cameras , just for a back up. But again fortunately we have all the sound recorded separate on Marantz which is good for us in this situation. I really hope that this will work and we will adjust it to the video properly. We can do it!

We were supposed to have the rough cut uploaded tonight but will be uploaded tomorrow because we didn’t have enough time to export it today because it was time for the building to be closed. So we will have it uploaded tomorrow. We have learned our lesson for future and will know how to set our cameras and how to record the sound and set it and everything. It will be pain but we will do it!

Once we all got started we all acted professionally in our roles, Me, G and Sam were quite the team to begin with, getting all the shots we could aswell as logging it down professionally, however this was time consuming, we were spending way too long on some shots and we could all sense the danger that could leave us in, also disaster struck…….the lights went out!

Big thanks to vish for this (as well as for everything else including the location) after we couldn’t work out how to get the lights back on and threting about reshooting the previous scenes due to light issues, he was on the phone and managed to sort it out for us. I can’t imagine the post I’d be writing now without that phone call, but I imagine I would not be in the most positive of moods.

As the night went on we got a lot more scenes done in a lot less time, however because of this, we all forgot to continue with the log sheets, this could prove a major problem for our editors as they will now have to search through more footage than they probably should do, if we had more time to calmly look around I would defiantly have stopped for a few minutes to do this, unfortuantly the thought didn’t occur until the backlog was too big.

I felt that the lighting was good for the main shots, but the candlelit scene was a challenge. having turned off all the lights we could I set up a lighting system similar to my drawing in the last post. however the aisles were not as wide as I hoped making this setup difficult-to-impossible. I ended up doing an altered version which looked okay from ‘simon’s’ side, but not so good from Elina’s I’m hoping that the difference is not too noticeable.

I should really take this time to thank all those outside of our groups who made this shoot possible (of course the panthers deserve credit aswell) but we had so many minor details that couldn’t have happened without Vish for helping us with the location and keeping an eye whilst we were filming, Liz for being there as support and for helping us out of a potentially tricky situation. my mate Sasha for providing the wonderful sketches of our ‘Elina’ and of course our actors for putting up with us for all that time.

Beyond this I think that everything went Ok we seemed to get every shot we wanted and no-one left in tears so not too bad, only major annoyance was forgetting to bring back the lighting gels resulting in myself getting a ban from the media loan shop, stupid mistake we all put down to tiredness but aw’ well I can live with it. Tomorrow I shall start work on the poster for this film whilst Sam, Anca and G begin to edit, expect plenty of progress in the next few days.

Shaun

Shaun capturing a scene.

Our Elina and Simon sharing a moment.

I worked closely with the actors during the night, ensuring that they were all happy and had enough tea/coffee to keep them going during the wee hours of the day. I felt bossy quite a lot of the time, and didn’t want to appear to be “mean” to the actors. Quite often when the crew was discussing the next scene I would go over to the actors and tell them to keep rehearsing for the next scene, so that they were fully prepared and so that we could capture the shot efficiently without having to do many takes due to it being un-rehearsed. As for actors, Colm (our Simon) was an excellent actor, and I thank him for being so co-operative and professional the whole time. I feel that he really understood the character and that we got the most out of him during the shoot. Madara (our Elina) was also great, and she delivered her lines well. One criticism of her is that she didn’t use her facial expressions enough. Sam and myself frequently told her to express her emotions and confusion via her face, as the film has little dialogue. However she didn’t seem to fully grasp this concept, and often we had to re-do scenes because there wasn’t enough emotion in her appearance. Despite this though she acted out Elina very well, and looked the part.

Marek looking terrifying with bananas.

Colm looking serious.

Nicolay (our Marek) performed the role very well, and I think was identical to how I pictured Marek to be. He was loud, aggressive and had over-powering mannerisms, which made Elina look intimidated. We were very lucky that Gergana found him (thank you!), and that he happened to physically look exactly like we pictured Marek, as well as being able to act him well.  As Nicolay had to leave early at 2am we had to get all of his scenes shot before then. I am very proud of all of us, as despite the power failure we still managed to shoot his scenes on time. Go Panthers! Finally there was our supporting artist- Andy. Andy had originally come in to audition for the part of Simon. However we felt he was not suitable for this role, so did not cast him. Andy had told us that he had never acted before, so if he did not get the part he was up for being an extra so that he could see how a film was made and to get some experience in the industry. This worked out very well for us as in one of the scenes we needed someone on the tills for Simon to take over afterwards. Andy was patient with us and very grateful that he could be apart of our film. As we were happy he was there too, everyone was a winner!

Shaun busy on the camera.

Our lovely-lit picnic scene!

During the shoot we encountered a big problem which was the lights going out. We tried every switch in the building and even pressed things on the circuit board, but still nothing happened. In the end I helped Vish ring the main power-board line and got them to tell us how to manually switch it back on. After a few minutes of panicking that we would have to set up the lights, and thus re-do the previous shots to keep consistency, the power came back on. Luckily we figured out how to work it and we were back on track with filming. At first I felt that we were all a bit confused as with what to do, and how to begin approaching the shot list. This was expected though, as none of us had ever done this before. When I was there I really felt like this was no longer a Uni project, and that this was like real-world filming. We were completely by ourselves, and had to rely on each other to work in a team to get things done.

Could make a good DVD cover.

Or this?

We all worked very well together though, and everyone managed to accomplish the best they could with their roles. During the shoot I also took the role of photographer. Having booked out a D90 I went about documenting the whole shoot so that we could reflect on it later and possibly use some of the shots for the DVD/Poster cover that myself and Shaun will be making soon. I enjoyed photographing the filming, and think that I got some really nice shots of the actors and us as a crew. I am particularly proud of the photographs that I took of the picnic scene. The way the candles are dotted in a line makes the frame look really beautiful, and the black background makes the flickering light stand out even more.

Simon during the picnic scene.

How we filmed and lit the scene.

We ended filming at 6am, having practically filmed for 8 hours straight with a 10 minute coffee and sandwich break. Sam was an excellent director for this, and took the role professionally and creatively. Shaun and Gergana made a brilliant team on the cameras, logging every scene as well as getting beautiful shots throughout. Anca was great on sound as well, capturing the dialogue and sounds of the shop perfectly. As for me I felt i did as best as I could as producer, and am loving the role so far! We finished literally just in time, with the main lights coming back on 5 minutes after we finished filming and staff beginning to arrive in the shop. The schedule and shot list seemed to work perfectly right up to the last second, as we even managed to get all our ‘extra’ shots done, to use as possible filler. The coach arrived at 7am and drove us all to the Ellen Terry building, where we waited (and slept) on the sofas until the loan shop was open. Gergana very kindly went back to hers to get her laptop and captured the footage, thank you for doing that G, I know the tired walk back must have been horrible! Once the equipment was handed in we all went back to ours and had the longest sleep a Panther has ever had. Well-done team!!

Shot of natural light in the store.

Andy observing and Anca helping with the camera.