Short Film Critique

A) RATIONAL: Through this film I wanted to send a message that would show the teenagers who watched this film, to enjoy and remember their high school years as best as they can. The short film starts off with a woman looking at an old high school yearbook. Through a flashback, the setting is moved to (Maria) her at her old high school. While we watch the memories of her, we begin to see what she is truly remembering as a bully (Justin), walks by and knocks down her books. In another memory we see the bully pull out her chair as she sits down. These instances set a sad mood as we watch the girl be punished for no apparent reason. As an actor and an editor of this film, I thought that it would be extremely effective if the bully was given a "sidekick" so to speak. The role of the sidekick became that he would participate in the bullying of the girl, but then help her after the bully had left the scene. This little surprise, gave the film a romantic twist to it. By doing this, the reason for the woman remembering these specific memories is also revealed in the closing scene when the girl and sidekick are going to prom together. I decided to portray the message of the film through this sequence of shots because it shows just how good things can be when looking at life with a positive outlook.

B) COMMENTARY: I played two roles in the creation of this film, as the main bully, along with one of the editors. Little problems occurred while acting due to the simplicity of our film. Along with the good team work and conjoined direction of the film. When editing though, I had much difficulty; I greatly underestimated the difficulty in editing a film, even one as short and simple as ours, and by not being properly prepared I was faced with problems I could not overcome easily. Of these problems, the worst for me, was finding and matching sound and music for the individual pieces of footage. During editing, in order to help solve my problem, I often referred to the tutorial videos that we had been shown in class. This helped me remember a lot of trick and methods to editing that I had forgotten. I would also often ask for help from friends. Due to the difficulty I had when editing in my sound, the only thing I am able to do now is to learn from my mistakes. Through watching and hearing other peoples opinions, I found that my greatest problem came in the fluidity of my music. Because the mood of the scenes would change so quickly, from happy to sad, I had trouble finding music nuetral enough for me to alter to fit each seen. As a result I was forced to use clips of different music which ruined the fluid motion of the scene itself and made the mood even more confusing and difficult to follow. Also we had problems with some aspects of continuity, for example in certain scenes there may have been people who appeared in the scene when they had previously not been there, or the apparent laps in time during certain scenes was detectible due to the audiences' knowledge of the setting. Other small aspects of mistake came in situations like lighting or transitions where unwanted silhouettes appeared or transparent shots from other scenes over lapped the scene.
         Luckily though while filming, my group managed to work well together which greatly minimized our problems. I feel that we could have been far more productive if we had chosen to film more thoroughly than we had. At the time, Max mostly, had the smart idea to film each seen from many different angles and distances in order to give us more footage to use when creating the final piece. Although this was a good idea, due to poor planning we ended up shooting few or limited shots from each angle. I feel it would have been more beneficial to have more versions of the same shot and many different shots that were poorly planned. Not to say that this didn't help, as is it did; simply that we could have taken this idea to a further extent. In order to make up for this, when editing, we were forced to make up for this in our editing. By using more transitions and subject change we were able to keep the audiences' focus on the what we wanted, like an emotion, rather than on the shortened length of each shot or the incompleteness of certain shots.
      As a final evaluation of the film, I'd like start by saying that although I'm not satisfied with my work, I am not completely disappointed because this was my first film. The sound in my film was way off, but I feel that the video was descent. I was satisfied, for the most part, that the continuity of the film was often consistent and clear without much distortion of time and space. I also feel that through my editing of the film, I was able to portray the emotions and ideas I had intended. In the future I believe to most effectively solve the problems I faced in this film could be fixed very easily. First and most importantly, I need to learn to manage my time more effectively. By waiting so long to start editing, I caused many unnecessary problems for my self. Second, I need to better plan how the film is going to be made, this way I will be able to edit the film more effectively because if the filming is pre-planned I will be able to minimize the need for editing entirely.