Film Evaluation

In preparation for the films studies A2 coursework, the class were given the task to recreate a scene from the film Maltese Falcon. The scene was chose by the course tutor. The aim was to recreate the lighting, mise-en-scene and cinematography; the performance side had little importance. My group consisted of  Georgia Corrigan, Nicky Walker, Riley Wong, Josh Worthington and myself. Although the group of us acted as a whole, giving each other constructive criticism, we all had our individual parts to play during production process. Georgia, Riley and Josh took it upon themselves to take the lead speaking roles, while Nicky and I had much more minor roles to play. The camera was predominantly operated by Riley, though he took all the advance if was given. I took control of lighting the scenes, which involved changing the brightness of the spotlight when appropriate, as well as being able to follow the cast fluently if moving around the location/set.

Before even starting any filming, we had to go through the pre-production. This involved story boarding our shots, as well as creating a production plan with inclusion of a list of available actors and available locations as well as the time and dates of which we planned to film.

Here is an example of a camera angle we tried to replicated.

During the production process, we decided to dress up in costume to make the scene as close to the original as possible. As well as this, we lit up the scenes with a spotlight in order to have a clear view of characters, as well as a way of creating or removing shadows. There were a few problems that we encountered during the filming; this was due to the short space of time we had to create the video, as well as finding a suitable location that would look like a private investigator’s office. We manage to find a free classroom and rearrange all the desks to give the room a more office-like feel. There were a few times where the continuity was not great as the filming days were different, and we hadn’t made note of what props were where within the scene. As well as this, having long speech parts made it a lot harder to have a continuous shot due to mishaps and mistakes. This even led our group to create a blooper reel. However, I’m very proud of the final result of our film.

He shows the colour difference with an after and before shot.

The original clip from Maltese Falcon was in black and white/greyscale, therefore, during post-production, we had to make all our clips in greyscale to match the original clip. Unfortunately, due to film and media studies being popular courses, the chance of getting time on an editing suite was minimal for there were only a limited amount of them. As well as this, we could only edit on one dedicated machine as we could not keep transferring our video across every time. We managed to finish the editing part of the task much fast than had been expected. Therefore, rather than using lesson time to do nothing, we went a little further and used this time to create a blooper reel to help show the troubles that happen when filming.

From the task I have learnt that the preproduction stage is vital if you’re expecting to film the same location over a course of more than one filming session. As well as this, I’ve learnt that the lighting and costume is very important if you want to give your film a specific look and feel to it. Overall I was extremely pleased with the outcome of our video, and I feel I know the dos and don’ts of what to do for the actual A2 coursework.