The meeting reflections

After every Unit, it's a good Idea to reflect on all the work that's been done as it helps to see where you've gone wrong and what you can improve and also it's a representation of the quality of your work.

I'm going to assess myself in stages so that my reflection can be detailed for my understanding.

Idea Development: 

This stage of the process has always been the easiest part for me given that I'm creative and love coming up with new stories and ideas. However, being too creative is also my fault. I feel I didn't think about actuality and whether or not it would be possible to put my film idea on screen as a student - and this is where a budget comes in. When making a film on a budget, it means there are less elements to keep your film going for the audience so it has to be a well written story and well written characters. When coming up with the idea of my characters I was particularly drawn to Maryanne as I felt I could empathise with her character having experienced a few deaths in my family, so in that sense it was an easy start to making up her character. But, at times i felt a bit stuck with the direction she was going in I felt controlled by her character rather than me making the words that would control her. For instance, she has a poetic and victorian nature about her, but other times she had a modern youthfulness to her character which didn't add up with the style of the script. But overall, I feel Maryanne's character is more complete than Jeremy's. Jeremy and Dr.Whittaker didn't have much character to them and were practically there to do my job which was to tell the audience maryanne's awful fate and at the same time show promise towards the end of her life through a relationship with Jeremy in which she would learn to love living despite her own complications. I could have included Jeremy's back story some more in the script to give the audience and myself a better understanding of his character. But there is always room for improvement and I intend to revisit this script and give his character more depth and personality so that his character is believable. This also applies to Dr. Whittaker whose character has the same faults as Jeremy's.

Scriptwriting: 

Having been taught the way Final draft works, and doing some research on my own, I was comfortable writing in final draft and following my tutorial with Steve it was apparent that writing is probably my best skill set on this course.  Writing my script was good seeing as i had planned it beforehand, all I had to do was follow my plan sheet. Although I made several changes to the story and style of the script.

Production Process:  

Production was the hardest part of the film process for me. I didn't enjoy the process because I was working alone without much help and the weather was completely against me. In addition, i couldn't use the camera I know how to use best as it was fully booked so I had to rely on my mediocre knowledge of the sony cameras. We had previously done workshops on the sony cameras but I just couldn't get my head around it. So not knowing how to make the most out of the camera really limited my work. In addition I experienced a lot of last minute problems. my initial cast made themselves unavailable after committing to my shoot date so I then had to get my sister and her friend to play the role and seeing as they;re not professionals they could only do so much. The editing process I mentioned in a seperate post in more detail so check it out there.