Working in a group of five for an amateur 30 second production is a near-impossible task. At the very most one should be in charge of camerawork and on the other side of production no more than two should take control over the editing, otherwise contrasting themes within the sequence would be extremely obvious and recognisable to the audience. Overall, this significantly impacted on our group’s efficiency and creation; negatively but astonishingly in a positive way as well. The upside being that creating our storyboard from scratch was relatively straight forward and fast due to the large number of people throwing in ideas for our horror themed production. After a long 10 minutes we were ready to film.
Inexperience
became the better of us and, as a whole, we decided to abandon our planned storyboard
and pre-drawn frames. This, on reflective analysis was unwise and foolish.
Making the most of the surroundings we decided a spiral staircase was a good a
start as any. The rain hammering down on the window next to the stairs was first-class
icing to our disorganised and haphazard cake. Little did I know that I was to
be the protagonist in our captivating motion-picture however resentful I was to
agree with this, due to the plain and clear fact that I’m not in Drama but rather in Film Studies. Nonetheless,
filming commenced and the day after we started our editing process. Down to a
manageable three people in our group we had ample time to put across our interpretations
and ideas regarding the horror genre. Rearranging the clips that we had filmed
and choosing the best ones was a complicated and drawn-out chore and I believe
that if we did stick to our storyboard, we would have found this experience to
be much less stressful and difficult. Afterwards, we decided that we needed to
include non-diegetic sounds because of the fact that our movie would have
otherwise been silent. Keeping to horror conventions, we chose suitable sound
effects including heavy rain and loud, eerie footsteps. Our movie was complete.
In
conclusion, I believe that inefficiency and inexperience was our downfall.
Working in a group of five was too many and deviating from the storyboard was foolish,
thoughtless and downright stupid. Nonetheless our ideas for the narrative and
our use of horror conventions were imaginative, creative and evident throughout
the sequence. Repeating this process again, ‘keeping
to the script’ would, in hindsight, be crucial.
