Evaluation

Our cinematography film is based around our main protagonist, a Sheffield news reporter who feels undervalued in his career and is desperately seeking the promotion to studio anchor that he feels he deserves. An anonymous call from ‘the Woman’ however, tips him off to a lead in the serial killings that have been happening around the Peak District area and he sets off to Grindleford in search of the lead- and the body- before the police turn up. Once he gets there, he finds not only a body but also a set up. ‘The Woman’ is in fact the serial killer and has set him up as an easy target. Remanded in custody, she’s got away with it.

Some of our main inspirations for this film came from not only everyday life but also influences from television and film. Nightcrawler, a very similar film about a man who fabricates evidence to make it as a freelance newsmaker was a big influence for me. The dark aspect of the plot as he got deeper and deeper into fabricating, even going as far as murder, was something I was interested in. However, when we all spoke about it we agreed that perhaps as a plot twist the news reporter should be innocent. The idea of placing the serial murders in Grindleford came about from Lauren and myself watching NBC’s Hannibal. Often on the show, the killings are in an isolated area as not to indicate any attachment to the killer themselves, but not random enough that the murder cannot eventually be traced back to the perpetrator.

The intended audience for our work would probably be adults aged 18 – 45, as our protagonist and scripts are both mature and therefore available for any audience to immerse themselves in. I do not believe that a particular gender would be interested as we tried to make our piece as gender neutral as possible in both characters and storyline to make sure that it would be more widely accessible. However, obviously people with a background of growing up around the Peak District area would be the most interested in our film as that is where the entire film is set. Also perhaps people with an interest in the crime genre, as I would classify our film as a crime film.

I think that our project has worked incredibly well and come extremely close to what was envisioned both by all of us as members and by the script. There have been no real bumps beside equipment failures in the production and everything mostly went to plan. I think that the genre is portrayed well; the audience will not fail to see that this is a crime drama film, and the plot is easily grasped and followed. I also think that our film is interesting and will keep people engaged for the duration of it, something that is hard for short films to do now that large audiences are used to the slow burn and big production of high budget films.

However, if we had had more time we would have perhaps liked some more shots of our main male character in his home to establish his personality and character a little bit further as from the interview to the phone call we do not know much about him as a person. Also if we had had more time, some more information about ‘the Woman’ would have been advantageous to the audience as her work as a serial killer is not really explained greatly in our piece. 

Making the work once we got past the initial planning and scripting stage was easy. We divided the script into sections so that we all got the chance to film a part equally and decided that we were going to edit together. As everyone in the group was on time the entire time and worked together very well there were hardly any mishaps at all during filming. Although we did have to go back to Grindleford three times due to the actors schedules being rather busy, and also had to find locations for our indoor shoots which weren’t easy to find.

I wrote the script that we used for our cinematography film when we realised what we wanted to do in terms of planning. After around four drafts, sending it to Lauren and Jessica to make sure that they were happy with it and didn’t want to tweak it each time. I found it quite stressful and hard to write in such a small amount of time, but once I got the details finalised with the group it was easy to get it down and scripted and could be redrafted with problems we encountered at meetings. Feedback from the group was essential on the script and having meetings really helped with this. The end result is very true to the script, and any changes that have been made and deviated from the script have been beneficial. We got a lot of footage, which I think really worked to our advantage as we then had a lot to choose from if the certain one that we were sure that we wanted turned out to not work at all in the film.

I filmed all the inside parts and the lighting change section of the ‘four elements’ that we were required to do. I found the inside parts easy to shoot as the actors were co-operative and if I needed someone to help me with the focus pulling someone would instantly step into help me. I really enjoyed shooting my sections, as focus pulling was something that I’d been keen to use since our workshop on tracking. I stayed very true to the script with the shooting, and we tried to dress indoor sets in accordance with both the script and in thought of art direction. When I did the indoor lighting change, we had on set changes in the form of a lamp being turned on when he picked up his phone. This didn’t work as well as I thought that it would but it was something that we were able to make better in post-production.

I’ve learnt a lot about camera and lighting with this module. I think one of the key things I learnt was rigging lighting and pull focus when tracking as I did not have a lot of experience with this previously. It was also something that became a key element in our film and I feel as though without the workshops it is not something we would have been able to do as easily. Experimenting with lighting in both the workshops and our films has helped me to further my abilities, as it was something I was unsure of how to set up before. The importance of lighting has also been highlighted to me through this, such as mood and colour change.

I also feel like the project has helped with my lack of experience of interacting with and selecting actors, something that I am now more confident in doing. It has also helped me to improve my screen-writing skills, as it is something that I am considering pursuing more seriously after university. It helps that actors also read the script, so that I could work out what did not sound right in the context of the situation.

I feel as though our team worked extremely well together and would be happy to work with them on further projects. We made sure to share the workload equally in terms of filming and doing specific parts of the script to make sure that we all had a chance at filming some of the work. A weakness we had perhaps was that due to the fact there were six of us; most of us also had jobs that sometimes clashed with filming. Although this was easily worked around due to the number of our group, although due to timetable clashes it wasn’t possible for everyone to have a large role in the editing process.