Film Critique

IB Short Film Analysis

A.
The film that I made was Love and Money; it's about a guy who has to decide between assisting to a date or a job interview. He can't go to both because they're both at the same time. As for my working plan; the idea was to shoot during the weekend most of the film so that we had footage to edit during the week and finish the rest of the shooting the following weekend.I wanted to incorporate time in the film and make it a thrill genre. I thought it was a good Idea because if everything was done properly, the project would have a great result.

 B.
In this film, my main role was cinematography, but I also collaborated in the editing. I chose this role because I like working with the camera and I thought I could improve my skills in many ways. Some challenges that I faced was using the Steadicam.  It was my first time using it and before actually shooting something, I practiced a little bit, but because the scenes included running, every step I took moved the camera drastically and made the shot look shaky. In addition to that, I also had to make sure that the shots had a good angle and that was a little difficult because while I was walking fast, sometimes the framing was not the best. However, the way I solved these issues was by redoing the scenes so that I could obtain better shots. Also, the director told the actor to jog instead of ruining because the editing could fix that.
Another challenge that I faced was shooting inside the house; there was a window and it affected the lighting in the shots. However I thought I could control it if my shots excluded the window, but because the actor moved around, I moved the camera and without noticing the window came in the shot and ruined the light. The worst part was that i didn't noticed the issue with the lighting until it was added to the computer. The only solution to this case was to re shoot the scene and revise that in every shot the window didn't come in the shot.

As for challenges that we faced in terms of the film; our big team production and the combination of ideas became one problem. We all had own role position, an it was very important the shooting, however, we were all involved i activities after school and it was difficult to find time where all of us could be there.  More specifically, my schedule didn't match twice with my teammate's and other times their schedule didn't allow them to shoot in a day day with a nice weather. In addition, another issue we faced was about how to do shoot and edit the film. We had one director, but sometimes i wouldn't agree with the way ha was directing and i would suggest something different, and other times someone else would have a different perspective about a scene, but the director wouldn't agree with it. It was difficult to take the best decisions for the film because there were different opinions that had the intention to improve this project.

The way we resolved these issues was by allowing someone else to take the role of someone else. For example, when I couldn't make it to a shooting day, the director took the role of the cinematographer. Also, because my teammates could do the shooting of a scene which was suppose to be in a sunny day, we end it up shooting it at the evening and decided to add color to such scene in the editing. As for the creative differences; the team realized that we have a director and although we felt he could incorporate our ideas into the film, it was his responsibility  to take all the decisions. We understood that we had to trust our director and hope that the final product would be worth of all the effort we put into it.

Now in  terms of the final product there are many areas where I could definitely say that we could have done better. For example in character development, there were some scenes that would have clearly helped to show character information and motives that made him struggled between the date and the job interview. However, because  these scenes where not accomplished, the audience didn't connect/sympathize with the character. Furthermore the editing was supposed to improve our project and present it in a compelling way to the audience. In the running scenes; we see the character running really slowly, or jogging, but it could have been improved by speeding the clip or show it through several cuts that just manifests the idea of  "the character running fast".  In addition, there was a scene where the protagonist bumps into a boy in a bicycle and both fall on the floor. After that knock down, the audience doesn't know if he can wake up and continue to run to his date; he does it, but the different takes of this scene are used in the film inappropriately because some are shaky and they don't transport no message and could be avoided.



In another areas such as sound; the films has a better looking. In the conversations, the  sound quality is good, but a the end we had difficulties with the boom mic and the sound didn't come out as neat as I wanted it to be. However, in the majority of the film there was no dialogue and the music played a big role in the audiences' emotions about this story. I thinks it was well done and it related to what was being shown in the screen. Moving on, the cinematography wasn't at a good level, I feel I didn't applied many new techniques that I've learned to improve the quality of the shots. Also, a considerable part of the camera work was done by some one else so there are different types of shots and camera movements.

Overall, I think the final product was unfortunately not as good as I imagined it, but something I'm glad I had the chance to experiment with was the Steadicam. I learned a lot using it and in the editing something I really liked was the color tint I use; it made it equal in every scene. Lastly I thought the setting was well done and helped the set up of every scene. I think I learned so much from this project because I had to go through situations I had never experienced before and now I have a better idea of how to solve it.