Our task was to create a two minute long segment of film. I took on the role of editor in the group.
Our Initial ideas were inspired by the British Social Realism genre. Examples of this genre include Bullet Boy (Saul Dibb, 2004) and Kidulthood (Menhaj Hudda, 2006). We wanted to pick up on key themes often used in this genre such as gun crime, drugs and gang culture. Our characters were:
· Marcus – The main protagonist
· Emma – A drug user and friend of Marcus
· Darius – Emma’s dealer who is now refusing to sell her drugs
· Darius’s Friend – Drug user who hangs about with Darius
We were originally going to film two scenes that lead up to the climax, one would be a flashback, set in the woods near college, of Emma demanding drugs from Darius and Darius refusing because she hadn’t paid him, this then turns into a fight in which Emma is badly beaten. The other, in Cambridge train station car park, would be a meeting between Marcus and Darius, with Emma and Darius’ friend on the sidelines, where Marcus and Darius threaten each other over what happened to Emma, Darius would then draw a gun and the scene would end on a gun shot and cut to black.
Our Initial plans were not possible. Firstly it would involve using a fake gun in public, which would be impractical as it would be too easily misinterpreted as a real gun. Then we realised that we would not be able to film in the train station because it is far too busy and we would have to keep moving out of the way of cars, it would also be impossible to get permission to film there anyway.
We encountered other problems during our project and as editor I learned allot about maximising minimal footage. An example of this is when we filmed the dialogue, we forgot to shoot any footage of the actors in character, not speaking so the scene cut with each new line and looked clunky. To fix this I took snippets of footage from out takes in which the actors didn’t speak and placed them over another character’s line e.g. at 0:35 where Marcus deliberately interrupts Emma to convey his anger. This quick cut made the scene more dramatic.
*Layered interuption footage
We wanted to make the scenes leading up to Emma’s meeting with her friend obvious that they were not set in the present so I put some video effects onto the footage. The video effects that I used were an increase in contrast and adding a soft glow filter to give it the feeling of being in the past. The use of blurring filters over flashback footage is also used in Life As A House (Irvin Winkler, 2001) where George Monroe remembers spending time with his son. Although this film is of the drama and romance genres it incorporates the themes of drugs and teenage relationships that we also tried to include.
*Flashback effect comparison: Left = our project, Right = Life as a House (2001)
From our feedback session we learned that our project noticeably lacked a soundtrack however because our film extract is largely dialogue based it was a good idea as music in the background may detract from the speech. One area for improvement was to get rid of sound bumps caused by wind noise on our footage, in order to fix this we would have had to remove the video’s sound and dub over the footage. Although this was a good idea we simply didn’t have the time. Another way to progress with our project was to re-film certain shots as the eye lines of the characters aren’t always looking at the person they are meant to be talking to. This makes the conversations seem less realistic and confusing to the audience, as it is hard to tell if they are talking to more than one person. The pushing clip between Emma and Marcus was another point to be improved. Originally it was going to be followed by Emma on the floor shouting abuse at Darius. Because of this Emma falls backwards more than normal when pushed. Before filming the next scene the script was changed and we didn’t have time to go and re-film it leaving us with an unrealistic fall. In order to put this right we would either have to film the scene again or film extra shots continuing the scene.
Our Initial ideas were inspired by the British Social Realism genre. Examples of this genre include Bullet Boy (Saul Dibb, 2004) and Kidulthood (Menhaj Hudda, 2006). We wanted to pick up on key themes often used in this genre such as gun crime, drugs and gang culture. Our characters were:
· Marcus – The main protagonist
· Emma – A drug user and friend of Marcus
· Darius – Emma’s dealer who is now refusing to sell her drugs
· Darius’s Friend – Drug user who hangs about with Darius
We were originally going to film two scenes that lead up to the climax, one would be a flashback, set in the woods near college, of Emma demanding drugs from Darius and Darius refusing because she hadn’t paid him, this then turns into a fight in which Emma is badly beaten. The other, in Cambridge train station car park, would be a meeting between Marcus and Darius, with Emma and Darius’ friend on the sidelines, where Marcus and Darius threaten each other over what happened to Emma, Darius would then draw a gun and the scene would end on a gun shot and cut to black.
Our Initial plans were not possible. Firstly it would involve using a fake gun in public, which would be impractical as it would be too easily misinterpreted as a real gun. Then we realised that we would not be able to film in the train station because it is far too busy and we would have to keep moving out of the way of cars, it would also be impossible to get permission to film there anyway.
We encountered other problems during our project and as editor I learned allot about maximising minimal footage. An example of this is when we filmed the dialogue, we forgot to shoot any footage of the actors in character, not speaking so the scene cut with each new line and looked clunky. To fix this I took snippets of footage from out takes in which the actors didn’t speak and placed them over another character’s line e.g. at 0:35 where Marcus deliberately interrupts Emma to convey his anger. This quick cut made the scene more dramatic.
*Layered interuption footage
We wanted to make the scenes leading up to Emma’s meeting with her friend obvious that they were not set in the present so I put some video effects onto the footage. The video effects that I used were an increase in contrast and adding a soft glow filter to give it the feeling of being in the past. The use of blurring filters over flashback footage is also used in Life As A House (Irvin Winkler, 2001) where George Monroe remembers spending time with his son. Although this film is of the drama and romance genres it incorporates the themes of drugs and teenage relationships that we also tried to include.
*Flashback effect comparison: Left = our project, Right = Life as a House (2001)
From our feedback session we learned that our project noticeably lacked a soundtrack however because our film extract is largely dialogue based it was a good idea as music in the background may detract from the speech. One area for improvement was to get rid of sound bumps caused by wind noise on our footage, in order to fix this we would have had to remove the video’s sound and dub over the footage. Although this was a good idea we simply didn’t have the time. Another way to progress with our project was to re-film certain shots as the eye lines of the characters aren’t always looking at the person they are meant to be talking to. This makes the conversations seem less realistic and confusing to the audience, as it is hard to tell if they are talking to more than one person. The pushing clip between Emma and Marcus was another point to be improved. Originally it was going to be followed by Emma on the floor shouting abuse at Darius. Because of this Emma falls backwards more than normal when pushed. Before filming the next scene the script was changed and we didn’t have time to go and re-film it leaving us with an unrealistic fall. In order to put this right we would either have to film the scene again or film extra shots continuing the scene.
Although this project challenged us with problems we worked well together and the finished extract works well.
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