Case Number 7234224- Final production

 

This project was done in a few bursts of action, with long stretches of time between each real session of working on it. As the project was completed over such a long stretch of time with extensive pauses, by the time I finished production most of my creative drive towards the film had dissipated. Because of this I allowed myself to go into automatic directing, following the story board with minimal riffing off the pre-production in the production. The only major changes I made were moments that required props were replaced with thematically comparable elements to make the production phase easier for me. Furthermore, there were some moments in the original story board that did not have the necessary transition between them which I added. In all this film will be around 40 shots of my creation and about 10-15 more pulled from news footage. The more challenging shots, such as the arrest scene, were cut and as said before I allowed myself to go into robot mode, so there were few challenges faced in this production phase. The only major challenge I experienced was in having to be the actor and cinematographer at the same time, which meant that it would take about double time to set up every shot. 

Despite taking a simplified approach, I feel this film will still be fairly successful in portraying the intended themes and upholding the mission of the assignment. Typically, I can only make things beyond bad student films with extreme focus and/or leveraging originality. However, many of the problems that typically make student films worse I am avoiding through my editing choices. Student audio is usually fairly bad, but I am making the audio in post using soundscapes on YouTube and classical music. Student use of color and lighting is typically fairly bad, but with the bleach bypass this is less of a problem. Student camera movement are typically fairly choppy, so they have all been cut. 

In taking the screen recording shots I first tried using loom, but that would not work, so I improvised and used zoom (using the screen share and recording functions). For the old news footage I simply took from YouTube using 4K media downloader. 

With production done I feel confident this film will be decent. Around the Fiery Trails level of quality.