Evaluation

Overall, I'm really pleased with how our final film turned out. I think that the different scenes link together really well and though its a very abstract piece of work, I think that there is still a coherent narrative.
As a group we worked really well together; we all played equal roles in all parts of the project. We shared out camera work and lighting set up. We had regular meetings to go over the primary narrative of the film, to come up with shot lists and storyboards. 
We had some problems with the scheduling, as our main actress could no longer work on the film in the final few weeks. This meant that our final film did change to what we had originally intended; though we didn’t have to change the main narrative of our film, we did have to make the decision to use a different actress in each scene.  We decided that this would be the best approach, taking the idea from Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr Parnasuss. Retrospectively, I think it works, as we ensured that the costume remained the same throughout, meaning there is still continuity between scenes. 
Other problems we had involved the equipment that we used. When shooting in the Peak District, we had issues with the portable track and dolly, primarily using it on uneven turf. For the majority of the final half of the action that occurs in Grindleford, we had planned to use a tree to be at the centre. However, here, the ground sloped down and due to the bad weather, using the track here became incredibly difficult. As this produced little footage that we were pleased with we tried to use handheld/steadicam. Despite the fact that we did achieve the shots we had planned for this, I don’t think the results are as neat as I would have liked.
As I was in a lot of the scenes in the film, I was limited in terms of what I could actually film. As a group we made the decision that I would shoot almost all the shots that I wasn’t in.  Though this meant I had the opportunity to film a wide range shots, I would have loved to have been able to shoot more. However, considering the circumstances regarding scheduling and availability, I do not think that there would have been away around this.
I think that our scene in the red room was really useful as it gave me an opportunity to use a lot of equipment and lighting that I had only used a small bit.  In particular I found it useful in terms of using lights; we had to think carefully about the lighting set up and the strength of each light.  As we used as many as eight lights at one time,  it meant that at times all members of the group were controlling a light so produce a light change for the scene.
I think one of the main strengths of our film is the abstract, fantasy narrative. This allowed us to be really creative in using and applying the four required elements in the film. Again, I think the red room stands out as the studio space allowed to have complete control over everything. We were able to produce a variety of clean tracking shots and use lighting in multiple ways. I also like our sequence shot at the beginning of the film. Doing this allowed us to think about movement within a shot really carefully. We wanted the shot to be interesting so we carefully choreographed it to allow the actors and camera operator to move around and between each other.
I think one of the weaker parts of our film is the section in Grindleford. I think a lot of the problems come down to the way that we planned this shoot. A lot of the shots that we had storyboarded were much harder to achieve within the outdoor environment than we originally thought. We were unable to use and produce many of the tracking shots that we planned. This meant that we had to resort to handheld camera and this, as expected, prdocued lower quality work. Furthermore, we had to shoot this scene over two days. For the first day we had really good weather conditions, with the sun really bringing out the autumn colours of the environment; this was key to the colour ideas we had for the scene. However, our final day filming in Grindleford brought terrible weather conditions meaning that when we came to edit the piece together, there was a stark difference in brightness and colour. I think that this is something that we should have planned much better, as doing so would have meant that while on site, we would have been far more efficient and I think would have led to less footage needing to be shot on the second day.

Doing this project has reinforced the need to plan your scenes and shots before going on set.  It has also made me think a lot more about lighting plans and drawing these out before you arrive on set, especially if you are using a lot lights. I think if we had done this, we would have shot a lot of our scenes much quicker. However, I think that the project has also made me more keen to experiment with lighting set ups in future projects as I think that though it might take a long time to put together, it can really pay off.