4 hour challenge 2- an unusual perspective

self summary
simmarily to our last film, we aimed to create an experimental short that completely disregarded the classical narrative structure. The only structure we had for this 4 hour film challenge was that it had to revolve around an 'unusual perspective", for me and my group, this was oddly hard to decipher. at first we thought of visual perspectives, and how we could experiment with technical aspects of a classic narrative to produce an unusual and visually challenging perspective, after a lot of discussion we came to the realisation that we couldn't effectively create this vision, we wanted to create a film that would utilise all our expertise effectively, and we didn't want to run the risk of creating a sub par film. we also discussed the prospect of exploring an unusual perspective through the use of narrative, this yielded more results, at first we discussed the possibility of a film that revolved around a single character, our brainstorming resulted in the idea that our short should revolve around a character who was suffering through psychosis, to effectively recreate a character who essentially suffered from a mental illness we planned certain shots and editing techniques to re create this. we used multiple fast jump cuts to represent the ever moving mentality of an individual suffering psychosis, how there mind never stays in the same place for once, our camera shots focussed on the movements, the subtle twitches and flaws our character makes. the audio we used is also worth discussion, we wanted to show our audience how these people suffering from psychosis suffer, to do this we looped guitar feedback from an amp alongside a constant heartbeat, the amp feedback was used to represent the intense mental pressure and disorientation the individuals who suffer from psychosis feel.
in conclusion i am thoroughly happy with our final piece, i feel that is not only accurately recreates an individual suffering from mental health, but at the same time it also recreates it on a technical level

peer review
upon critique, me and my group identified certain faults that were raised in our film, for example, our audio at a certain point was obviously looped, the pitch dipped and then raised back to its original state obviously. we could easily correct this by cutting the audio down by a second and moving it back to the point of the cut, this would have resulted in a piece of audio that was seamless. another fault that was raised was that out film seemed to have no narrative, who was this individual, why did he have a gun, why was there no ending, were all questions that were raised. we explained that our film was intended to have no narrative or no explanation, that it was intended to simply to be explanation or a recreation of individuals undergoing mental illness, however we can understand that the audience didn't understand what was happening, there is no narrative and there is no explanation, because that is by design
another critique that was brought up is the fact the light level changed across the film, this was due to the level of natural light and how it increased over time, there was no way we could have changed this, given more time and more advanced lighting equipment we could have compensated for they increase light by repeating the exact same lighting, but due to time and equipment restraints we could do neither.
in conclusion i am extremely happy with out final piece, i believe it entirely meets our initial plan of recreating a representation of mental health in an individual, not only thematically but also technically. however if we were to re shoot this piece, i would put more time into tho planning of the film, especially the time it was filmed, in order for a constant level of lighting to be present.

4 Hour Film Challenge

4 Hour Film Challenge 

A short Noir experimental film depicting a investigator discovering the crime scene in which a woman discovered something unknown, our film shows uses of multiple pull focuses to confuse and disorientate, paired with quick violent jump cuts, rising non diegetic sound and low key lighting to create a narrative with depth, intrigue and a sinister atmosphere. a combination of static and moving camera angles such as a point of view shots and static wide mid shots creates a sense that the protagonist is both watching and being watched. the product of these techniques creates a viewing experience that fully absorbs the viewer.


self-review

upon re watching my 4 hour film challenge i have become aware of several errors and flaws that i could re shoot in order for my film to reach a higher quality of production. one of the most glaring problems within my film is the fact that a large section of the film is slightly out of focus, this was due to myself trying to overcompensate for the dark setting by raising the aperture of the camera, in turn this raised the brightness of the image at the expense of rendering the footage unfocused, to remedy this i would have to go back and re-shoot the footage with the aperture in a more suitable setting so that the footage remains high quality, i would then have to raise the overall brightness of the footage in post production.
another problem that was raised in the group evaluation of the films was that there didn't necessarily seem to be any narrative to my film, and if there was narrative then it was hard to uncover. whilst i can see that this would be considered a fairly huge problem for a film that relied heavily on its narrative, i wouldn't necessarily call this a fault within my film, my film was intended to be experimental, its purpose was to confuse and disorientate the viewer, and only upon multiple viewings can any narrative be discovered. another issue that was raised in the group evaluation was that the ending seemed some what blunt, that there was no narrative climax to the film, again this was intentional, during our pre production we realised that our film had slowly began to conform to genre cliche's, extreme close ups and tracking shots gave our film the impression of a generic horror film, it was our belief that with a un-climatic ending we would subvert these expectations. however i can see how the film had very little narrative climax to it, if we were to re-shoot these films i would certainly go back and potentially plan an ending that had more weight to it.
personally i fount that the time scale i had to work with in order to create this film was extremely short, time quickly caught up with us, meaning that we had to cut parts of the filming, the planning and the editing in order to make sure we had enough time to get the basic footage and editing complete. theres very little i could have done to change this as the 4 hour time limit was out of my control, however, next time we are presented a 4 hour challenge, i can plan ahead, focussing on quality of shots and editing over quantity of footage, this would therefore create an admittedly shorter film, but one that consists of slick visuals and aesthetics.