PMP

Task 1 - Understand single camera productions

Tutorial videos:

This is the YouTube link to my tutorial video on shot types and camera angles.

https://youtu.be/vG4Cu88c6nI

 

Part B  – Preparing a pitch

Proposal

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My film 'Desperation' is a post apocalyptic movie featuring the plight of two brothers on their way to a sanctuary. The eldest brother, formerly the provider for the pair, was recently wounded in a raid, leaving the youngest to lead them to the safety of a compound in the hopes of getting his brother the medical attention he so desperately needs. Concerned only with the well being of his brother, Mark fails to notice the signs that they are not alone in the wilderness. With the film being based around two young adults trying to make a life in the post apocalypse, I believe that my film works well for a young adult audience, 15-21.

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The film requires us to film in a woods and will not necessitate a great deal of props, simply a few pieces of camping equipment: tent, sleeping bag, pan knife and a torch. The film is only to be around 3 minutes long, and shall only take place in one location, so the film will not take long to produce and shall be made on a very low budget, only needing to accommodate for the makeup used to create a fake knife wound on one of the two actors.

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I feel that my film will be unique because it is essentially a campaign trail movie, focused on the troubles to find food and survive against the plights of the wilderness whilst making the harrowing journey to a better life, only set against a post apocalyptic backdrop instead of a western.

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Daily Production Reports
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Sunday the 9th of June11:30 PM, the production begins. Following a brief idea to have a film based around a family on the campaign trail set in a western period. I started to write the script and immediately realised that seeing as how I had to record the film in one day, I decided that the western theme would have taken more time to organise and plan than I had, so I switched frontiers over to a post apocalyptic theme. The script itself took me under an hour to write and the rest of my time was spent organising how

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Link to my Final Film

https://youtu.be/m0ykny2ib3M

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 Evaluation

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'Desperation', my final film, was not the film I had imagined creating. That is because its not the film I wrote for my final piece, at least not initially. It was more of a last minute change, by last minute, I mean it was written and planned about 12 hours before filming was set to take place and was conceived on a walk to KFC following a kitchen meeting at work. The meeting finished early, leaving me with just under two hours to linger about Teesside Park before I had to return to work, at which point, at around 10 AM, having had very little sleep, I decided that I had made a mistake in bringing 'Good Omens' with me to work, as I felt too tired to read, and instead wished I had brought my switch with me. With this, I thought of the game I had wished I could have played, 'The Banner Saga' a  medieval, game in which the gods have died, leaving the realm of man to suffer on without its governing forces, the sun has fallen and ceased to rise, resulting in an eternal winter, food supplies are slowly diminishing and those surviving are forced into fleeing from a malign race, intent on inhabiting the fallen world themselves without the surviving humans. A story which I have somewhat updated into a fallen society, it remains post apocalyptic, only without the supernatural aspect, and the pursuing creatures are instead roaming bandits. The two brothers in the plot are still in search of sanctuary, struggling to attain food and survive against the elements, inexperienced in this manner of living, they desperately search for sanctuary on a distant location.  I felt that this was a simple premise, which is what was needed in order for me to be able to organise and write a film on the shooting day's morning, 6 hours before heading to work. The reason that I needed to very quickly produce a new film idea, was that I only had the Sunday evening to produce a film, I had used the Friday I had booked to attempt filming the final piece I had planned, organised and actually liked as an idea, however, needing a cast and crew of around 15 at an absolute minimum, and having 5 people total turn up, one of which saying that they need to leave a half hour after picking them up, I quite struggled to even begin with that idea. And opted that instead of having 3 people play every single role in the film, I should instead try to make the music video I had planned 2 years prior. This too did not turn out as I had hoped, as of course, something organised 2 years ago may not be the simplest thing to produce as the assets required to create it were long since binned or expended. Obviously, this didn't turn out that well and was the final push for me to come up with a new idea entirely, thus, my final film, 'Desperation', named for what I felt writing it.

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The initial problems I have with the film come from the writing, opening the film , I wanted it to be instantly apparent that the leading brother, Mark, was the younger and more naïve of the pair. Because of this, I had Mark talking about his hopes for potential of an easy, comfortable life at the sanctuary they were heading to, as a means to take his mind off the gruelling reality he now has to face. In the story, it is revealed to the audience that Chris, the eldest brother has been mortally wounded, and has had to step down as the leader and provider of the pair. This is where the primary problem with the story is, at least I think that it is the case.. As, 1: were the cut to be bad enough for Mark to have taken charge then surely the gravity of the situation would have taken some effect and he wouldn't be talking about televisions and would perhaps be showing some slight amount of care for his brother whilst walking through the woods. Even if Chris were hiding the cut from him, then it wouldn't make that much sense for Mark to be leading the group or for Chris to be very clearly at deaths door and coming down with an infection. What I should have done was to make Mark sombre from the start, and make it more obvious that either Chris was hiding it and the wound was fresh, having him collapse from blood loss, or have it be an old wound and force Mark to desperately venture to the sanctuary in order to try and save his brother from the infection. The later scenes showing Mark setting up the camp I was fairly happy with, well a little anyway. In the script, Mark was supposed to have a lighter of his own to try lighting the fire, the lighter was supposed to be low on fuel and fail to light up the campfire. Which I felt was a decent indicator that Mark had not fully adapted to the new world, and that he was not that much of a planner/forward thinker. Being so used to how the old world was, he never attempted to move past the modern day basics of lighters, as he'd never had to depend on anything like that before. Chris on the other hand, has a widely used camping utility item, an easy striker flint, that and a knife allows for innumerable lights, as long as you have the knowledge of how to properly assemble a fire, which a person who owns one of these will. So I felt that this scene would have worked to further highlight the differences between the brothers, and how even with Chris' worsening condition, just how much he was needed for the pair to work and that he had been the one keeping the two surviving for as long as they had. So I did kind of like the idea of this scene, however, when we came to the day, we couldn't get our hands on a flint, so we had to have it just be that Mark has nothing, and he clumsily fumbled with the lighter like something out of an infomercial. Which of course looked rather silly, leaving a few extra shots being cut out. Another few issues with how this scene played out was that in the script, the camp was supposed to be built in a clearing in the woods, surrounded by a thick treeline, which paired with Mark leading them the wrong direction and a few signs of people having been there, was supposed to emphasise that he did not know very much about surviving, as if roaming bandits is an issue. Not having a clear view of your surroundings, being in the open with no defence and lighting a fire in the open is not the best idea. But the only spot we could find was actually quite nicely enclosed, so much so that we had to disassemble the tent between takes so we could actually move around to get shots from different angles.  Another problem with this scene is that once mark had made food for the pair, he was supposed to set a bowl aside for Chris and begin eating himself, at which point, he was to realise just how bad of a state his brother was in and have to face up with the situation. But we forgot the bowls on the way down, so he cooked it and then just left the pan in the background of the rest of the scenes of the film. I will however state that Bernie's makeup for this scene was very good and quite graphic, which did actually make for a few decent shots of the movie.  As a side note, the soup began to smell quite foul as time went on, and for Luke who was laid on the ground for a good few hours, this was not the most pleasant, leaving him feeling quite ill and nearly vomiting during a few of the scenes where we filmed Jonathan. 

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So with the few parts of the film that I actually didn't mind out of the way, we can move onto the parts that I feel a fair deal of disappointment towards. I feel I cannot loathe the end product, as that could only be achieved if it were to be the creative outlet that I had initially desired. But that was for a completely separate film idea. This project I simply wish had turned out better, and I believe that had I had more than 24 hours (really it was more like 12 after taking away sleeping after writing it and going to work)  to put the thing together, it may have been. Tangents of regret aside, shortly after the bandage scene, we come to the final third of the film. In which, Tyler has realised that he needs to get help immediately and is consulting the map for where he has went wrong with directions. Adam and I were crouched behind Jon in a 1 person tend trying to get a shot of him looking out to the forest and leaving, all the while, the tent is falling onto the boom, into shot, doors are closing on us or the tent is simply falling down. In the end we had Luke stand outside the tent and hold it up (this is when he was starting to feel like he was about to pass out and/or vomit), this is also the time when in the space of 5 minutes, all of the light in our shooting location disappeared. We could see quite clearly out onto the farmer's field near us, where the sun was still out, setting but still out and quite bright. But in our little hovel, where everything else had been filmed, the lighting seemed to skip over the twilight hours, and delve straight into an abyssal darkness. So we very quickly had to start getting everything in one take. So the exterior shots of the tent we had told Jon to hold the tent doors open with his knee, which moved him a bit from where he initially was, we also still had Luke holding up the tent, thankfully due to his dark tracksuit pants, army jacket and the cameras growing fuzzy as they struggled to cope with the lack of lighting, you can't really make him out unless you know he's there in the final film. We also failed to get the shot of Mark leaving the tent after all of the troubles we had with it. So the next scene showing Mark venture into the woods in search of a landmark to refer to with the map sort of just happens with no real transition, and at this point the light fades even further, so the shot of him walking away from camp is only really clear when he shines his torch on the map. The shots where he runs back to camp become pretty much unusable, save for the small amount of light cast by the torch, which also just started to die suddenly, we could barely see Luke or Jon in the scenes at all, which is why we ended up using a point of view shot rather than a reactionary shot of Mark scanning the treeline, it was simply the only way we could actually get something usable. The final shot where the bolt hits the tree was supposed to be focused on the bolt and change focus to Mark in the background as the realisation that he and his brother are about to die dawns on him. But we couldn't see a damn thing through the cameras so we ended up just having to stop with being able to see the crossbow bolt stuck in the tree and cut to black. In post production, I attempted to find sound effects for people walking through the woods, rustling leaves and breaking twigs as the footage we recorded for this seemed to disappear, I didn't find that many good ones, so I only added the audio over the scene where Mark realises that he's being followed, rather than dotted throughout the film quietly as I had hoped. But this did work better than the sound effects for arrows hitting trees, as they all sounded very cartoony or just plain bad.  I ended up having to make my own by mixing the sound of an arrow getting loosed and the sound of wood getting chopped with an axe. The end result of the sound editing I felt was fine, but there was a brief period where the film had a Tom and Jerry esq sound effect as the final climax. As soon as shooting stopped, the torch all but stopped working entirely and Luke began to feel like death. We had to pack down using our phone torches as it got so dark that we couldn't see what was lingering on the ground. 

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Despite my personal grievances with the film, I do believe that the film could have gone a lot worse than it did. It is far from resembling anything that could be called perfect, but for a project, I believe that it is functional, and it served as a very good learning tool for myself as well as the opportunity to actually direct properly, something which I had always shied away from in the past. Of course, I only ended up directing because the director I'd hired grew annoyed with me and demanded to be taken home, and my camera operator didn't understand the script or what it was supposed to be about. In the end I actually kind of enjoyed directing, the stress of having to get everything done that day propelled me to be quite efficient once I had to very quickly assume the role of director. Having my script laid out in a manner as to be easily read as shot types and what is to be shown in each shot made it easy to tell the camera operator what to do and having a skeleton cast/crew made it quite a manageable shoot for a first time director. This also allowed me to further understand the importance of pre production paperwork and its necessity when it comes to an efficient shoot. Thankfully I had completed the organisational paperwork for that day for the film prior to 'desperation', so I merely had to cancel a few cast members on the day to suit the new schedule. The rest all came with shot lists and story boards which had to be completed for my director of cinematography as well as updating risk assessments to suit the new environment we would be filming in.

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If I were to do this project again, I would arrange more than one shoot day to pickup missed shots and ensure that everything could be designed around my original set design plans and I would allocate further time to be spent on the script writing process to iron out some of the plot holes/inconsistencies. As well as taking the time aside on a shoot day to ensure we had all necessary props with us. Time constraints were our primary problem, as we only had that one shoot day to do the entire film, and though planning had to begin and end that morning, some things were rushed, which slowed things down on the day. Having a day set aside to plan out in depth camera plans and go through my plans with the crew of the film.