Reflection on Creation of Product

-What went well?

Although overall our product has changed quite substantially from our initial idea, we are both very happy with our end product and we think that we have improved massively as filmmakers from last year. We think that in our product this year we have shown that we have a strong sense of visual style and that we can adapt it in different ways depending on what is happening in the specific scene we are shooting. This year we were able to experiment with the narrative structure of our film by using a non-linear story line. This enabled us to show that we could successfully tell a story with little dialogue whilst switching through different periods in time. This year we were able to integrate many more layers of audio into our film, both diegetic and non-diegetic, which is something which we struggled with last year, however we made sure that we devoted a lot of our time on getting the sound right this year. My partner in making this film and I both made films by ourselves last year which we found difficult as it was a lot of work for one person to be doing. This year we found it was much easier working together as it took some of the pressure off in getting the work done.

-What have I learnt?

This year I would say that I have definitely improved upon my skills as an editor, which is a job that I previously found tedious and boring. However, this year I have learnt much more about editing and have become more well versed in using software such as Adobe's After Effects, Photoshop and most notably Premiere Pro. This year I have learnt much more about the different effects which can be used on Adobe's Premiere Pro and how to customize them to fit into my film properly whereas on previous films I have just used effects with the default settings and they have never quite seemed natural in the film.

-What would I do differently?

If I was to make this film again I would make sure that we had a finished script and storyboard earlier on during the production because at times we were struggling with staying to the story as were often developing and changing the script. Another thing which I would do differently would be to stay more to the script, although having said that one of my favourite parts of our film wasn't in the original script and was actually just a product of our experimentation and improvisation.