Film Task- Life as a Greek God

When we were given the brief for this task, my partner and I immediately set to work on developing an idea. Right from the beginning we were both set on doing a documentary style film, but we were stuck as to what the documentary should be about. From the brief we knew the documentary had to have clear story running through out; thoughts such as the librarian jumping out of a cupboard dressed as a fairy, and a physics teacher revealed to be a super hero, entered our minds; we knew these were unrealistic, and had no story to them, but from this we had gathered the foundation for our production. We both were keen on the idea of secrets and identities, so from this we fabricated an idea of a secret transvestite- a women who was living her life as a man. Just as we were set on this idea, one of our friends- Antonios- came over. We wanted the revelation of the main character being a transvestite to be the ending of the story, the surprise; and on seeing him, the problem we were having, ‘why would there be a documentary about this person in the first place came?’ was solved. He’s Greek. And there our idea was fully formed and ready for the plot; the documentary was to be about a man who thinks he is a Greek god, and his girlfriend after a drunken fight spills the beans about his sexuality.
Now armed with the story, we set to work on the script. I did most of this, but I regularly consulted Emily about ideas and what she thought should happen at certain points. I wrote the script for the actors, adding their personal traits to the whole thing, as we already knew who we were going to cast.
With the script and actors in hand, we started the process of filming. We pretty much knew the locations we needed and wanted, and they were all on hand at college; apart from the party scene setting, which acquired a living room, but Kat, who plays Demetria allowed us to film at her house. Finding a time when we were all free proved to be difficult, the two actors only shared one free period a week, so we filmed the scenes they were in together then. Shooting the other scenes gave us no trouble, except in one shot we needed Antonios’s character to be running around outside in the rain; and the day we needed to film it, there wasn’t any; it was a bright sunny day. But we can always count on the good British weather to bring us rain, and a short time into filming another scene, the heavens opened and it started raining. So we shoved poor Antonios out the door, flinging his script behind him, and started filming from the safety of indoors through a window.
Filming took longer than we allocated, this could be due absences of actors, or poor planning on our behalf, or even spending too long on particular shots, trying to perfect them. Needless to say filming took priority over editing time.
We started the editing process as we were filming; editing together shots we had just taken, instead of waiting for all the shots to be filmed. I believe that this helped a great deal; we were able to slowly put all the pieces together while still filming others. From doing this, I feel that I’ve learnt a lot more about how the Adobe editing software works, and am able to produce finished scenes quicker.
Another acquirement of the brief called for dubbed sound. This I had never done before so I had trouble attacking the task to begin with. But then I remembered the headphones and microphones I had used to produce a radio production for my GCSE media coursework. But they were not to be found. So Emily and I asked a friend if he knew of any way to produce high quality voice recordings, he told us of a programme he had on his Mac Book which could do the job, and agreed to let us use it to do the recordings. Kat and Antonios were anxious as how they were to get their timings right in the recordings, so we played the film for them to listen to as they spoke into the Mac Book, we gave them headphones so the filming noise wouldn’t be heard on the recording.
When I went to dub the sound, I found that this method had been very effective, and the timings were almost perfect. There are some places where I couldn’t get the voice moving in time to the lip movement. And in some scenes we didn’t turn the computer onto low energy mode, so there is a slight whirr of machinery in the background. But all in all I think I enjoyed the editing and dubbing the most out of the whole process.
I am happy with the finished product, but there are a few things that I wish were different, such as: some of the camera angles and steadiness of the shot. Some of the transitions don’t quite fit as smoothly as I would have liked. And I would have liked to have had time to finish off the titles.
So for the next production, I need to manage my time more efficiently and be more picky about the shots.