For this 4 hour film challenge, our brief was to create a short 2-3 minute silent film based on a fairy tale of our choice, however loosely.
For our film, my group decided to use the fairy tale of 'The Ugly Duckling', as a starting point. The classic story tells the tale of a duckling who, when hatched along with his brothers and sisters, is ridiculed and bullied because they perceive him as ugly. He wanders alone through the winter months, feeling fearful, lonely and sad. In the spring he flies away from the marsh and meets up with a group of swans, and realises that he too has become a beautiful swan.
For our adaptation of this fairy tale, we decided to use the general moral of the story but instead focus on poverty and wealth rather than physical appearance.
We planned to start the film showing the protagonist looking depressed and lonely because he has no money, and show other characters treating him badly, bullying him or not wanting to be around him. Then the main character would find a coin and decide to buy a lottery ticket/scratchcard and wins. Main character is so happy as he finally has money and goes shopping. Suddenly people are interested in him, but he doesn't care as they treated him badly before.
For this film, my role was Director so I was overseeing the production as a whole and working with the Director of Photography to decide on different shots and directing the actors in the scenes.
Shot list/storyboard:
Photos/videos behind the scenes:
Silent Movie First Cut
Class feedback:
- music cut could have been a bit smoother and could change when he wins the scratch card rather than when he leaves the shop
-like the shot of emptying pockets
-could have used more title cards to help explain the story more and make it clearer for the viewer/make it more exaggerated
Evaluation:
For this 4 hour film challenge, I felt that we planned the film well and worked well as a group. For instance, we planned a shot list and storyboard. We also thought out different locations we wanted to use before filming and then tried to shoot scenes strategically, in chronological order and also in order of which locations were near each other. One of the health and safety issues we faced was that we had to be careful when using the reflector as to not shine it into car drivers' eyes. As the film was all shot on location and mostly outdoors, the suns natural lighting created a really striking effect, especially when put in to black and white. Another issue we encountered is that we used a 60mm static lens to film, however this meant that the camera had to be placed very far away from the subject as the lens couldn't be zoomed in or out. To give more variety, we could have used more various camera techniques including more handheld camera rather than predominantly tripod shots, as this might have made the film feel more personal. When editing my film, I realised that there was camera shake in quite a few of the clips. This could have been avoided if we took multiple takes of scenes and actively reviewed the footage more carefully. For the background music, I decided to use the song 'Sirtaki' from Zorba the Greek, as I like the way it starts with a slower tempo and then becomes more upbeat as the song goes on. I listened to various 1920s silent film music, but unfortunately I couldn't find any that had a change in tempo, so I felt that they were less fitting with the storyline. One issue I had with the music was that the change in tempo was not in the right place for the change in storyline so I had to try and cut it down, however this ended up in the change sounding too abrupt so I decided to fade it in and out to reduce this. Furthermore, when adding the title cards I screen recorded a title card background on YouTube but I didn't know how to remove the logo from the corner of the video. When editing my video parts of the footage also kept glitching which I didn't know how to prevent.
Comments
Post a Comment