Short Film Evaluation

Short Film Project

The project was to shoot a short film, without sound, consisting of eight static camera shots of someone's journey from point A (shot 1) to point B (shot 8).

8 Shot Journey.

I used a simple story element of the student not being aware that the college was empty because he was too engrossed in his music. This would have been conveyed a lot better if I could have used music, like we were originally told.

It was my intention to make the college look as isolated as possible which I believe I managed fairly successfully by having two shots in an unlit classroom and a wide shot of the lift hallway with a full bin of rubbish in the front of the shot. All that was really missing was a wide shot of the empty atrium although this was not possible for obvious reasons.

Storyboard

Before filming I drew out the eight shots on a storyboard along with some basic notes for each scene.. I managed to film each shot as I originally intended apart from the need to flip the direction (I.e. actor walking left to right instead of right to left) for a few shots to keep the consistency of the film/shots.

Log Sheet

Once the recording had finished we had to playback all the footage on the camera, taking a note of the time codes for each shot, and make a note of the best take for each scene.

Using time codes are a massive timesaver when working on a longer film or a film with lots of different shots, like a music video. This is why a log sheet is extremely important.

We used Final Cut Pro to complete this project. Using the ‘Log and Capture’ feature it allows us to enter the opening and closing time codes for each shot we want to use. Once all shots have been captured you can then begin to edit and create your short film. I dropped my eight shots in the timeline and within the ‘Viewer’ I was able to edit out any handles or unwanted frames. The editing was simple as the project itself was simple and therefore did not take long to complete.