Short Film - A Day in the Life of a Pen

For an introduction into moving image, I created a short film with the concept 'A Day In The Life Of...' this is something that was simple, quick and didn't take a lot of planning but it taught me this:

Scripting & Storyboard: 

The scripting was less important for our short film as we had very little dialogue and therefore needed little instruction. This meant it was easier for us to storyboard our ideas into a clear and workable format. We used only 10 scenes in the storyboard and wrote notes alongside the images in the storyboard. Throughout the task we were very aware of the storyboard and followed this greatly. It was very helpful and meant that throughout the whole task we had something to focus on and had the organisation that we needed. 

Location:

As you are able to see this was a very short film and therefore we created the idea of titling the film 'A Day in the Life of a Pen'. This meant that we didn't overly consider the location as it was easy to film the whole thing  within school. Due to being able to film everything in school it was much easier as we did not have to take the cameras offsite. This may not be the case for our final coursework as it is a longer and much more complex piece of work.

Talent:
The only talent needed for this filming was someone to hold the pen and the pen itself. However I can understand how difficult it can be with the continuity if there is more than one person. It was quite difficult to rely on some people even for the tiniest of roles in the short film. For our final coursework, whether it be a music video or a short film I will be sure to use people that I can rely on and that will make it easier and much more stress free to film. 

Organisation:

This is very important in any filming project. Although this was only a transitional piece of work it still needed to be planned and organised. Without organisation we wouldn't have had clear ideas to follow from a storyboard and we wouldn't have had clear examples of scenes. Obviously not everything works to a plan and due to the lack of cameras within school, we sometimes had to put off filming on a day we had planned to because the cameras were in use. Hopefully for our final coursework we will have access to cameras outside of school, if not we will organise our time and book video camera from school so we are guaranteed them when we need them. 

Teamwork:

As I worked with another person it was very important to us to work as a team to finalise ideas and organise what to film. This shows us how important it is to compromise with ideas to what is easier to film and more realistic, also to improve the overall look of the short film. Also as a class we had to work as a team and compromise, as there were a lack of cameras that we were able to use, when someone was using ours we had to either share it in school or let them use it and organise around them. I will be continuing to work as a team for our final piece of coursework as I will be working with Alice and Sofie.

Editing:

I had some knowledge of the editing software previously, however not alot. This transitional piece of work allowed me to learn much more about the Macs and also about iMovie. It was difficult to look through all the different clips we had filmed for different scenes and place the correct one in, in order for the whole short film to flow with little continuity errors. Also in the film we had sound that was all added post production. Our title and ending music was composed on garage band which meant we were able to manipulate the emotions of the audience how we wanted and were not restricted by existing music. A voiceover was used as well during the stop motion, this is the only time we had to script anything, it made the audience realise that the character 'the pen' had feelings. Also we used a song throughout the piece as background music.

Final Product:

Overall for the time frame we had to create this short film, I am very proud of the look of it. I like that it is a very different topic and subject to others and it seems to work quite well. I particularily like the stop motion part of the film as it allowed us to expolore with different types of effects. Also because a pen is a inanimate object it means we were able to give it a sense of movement and interest as oppose to it just being a film that has a song playing constantly.
If I would have had more time to complete this project, I probably would have made the continuity of the short film slightly better and spent more time on the filming.