Lost and Found Film Development | Testing Ideas

I'm going to write about the development of my film and show how it has changed since the start.

My story started out very basic but talking to the people on the course as well as the lecturers it has changed a lot. Some of the big developments have only been recent. Mike Rymer who came in to help make our films look better actually helped me with my story as well. He said that there really needs to be a good reason for the vents in my story to unfold. I did tell Mike that I knew this was the part of story I needed to improve and he helped me by suggesting that this could be a recurrence of something that happens earlier in the story so that triggers Ricky to be so angry and flip like this.

Whilst talking to Steve I really realised that my story needed to be adapted and whilst doing the screenwriting for my film I realised that simple stage directions and actions could be more important that words. Show not tell was what Steve kept drilling into us, and I tried my best to get that into my film as my original idea had way too much dialogue and not enough action.

Whilst editing Ferg and Simon helped me a lot. One or two frames can make a big difference so that is what I had to get into my head. Close tidy editing was needed for this to be improved. Simon showed me what shots worked and didn't and I looked through my options and luckily i generally had more than 1 option for each shot. However if I where to do this again I would definitely make sure I did at least 4 takes of each shot as 2/3 seemed to be not enough some times!

Feg really did help me out with some neat editing tricks to improve how the film is presented. Flipping the image if I broke the 180 degree rule (which I might have accidentally done!) was a big help as well as editing out a green screen in after effects to make my news report look a lot more realistic.

I also needed to test ideas and see what worked, as of course it was not all going to go to plan. Having to adapt to certain circumstances also was a big issue for me as Andrew didn't help for one day meaning  lot more of the film was filmed on tripod than I wanted, and also we had problems where 3 people where in shot and at times there where 4 characters being used so we had to switch roles whilst filming which was really frustrating. i did also test a lot of shots for the same scene. I think this worked as I got some shots that I did not storyboard and I think they came out very well. We also had to adapt to the beach not being out when we arrived meaning some scenes played out very differently to how I had originally planned.

My 25 word pitch was "Two friends who have not seen each other since primary school bump into each other. Whilst catching up they discover a dumped body."

In essence it's exactly what I stuck to. Obviously in 25 words you can't tell the whole story but I have massively adapted from what I first thought and it has been a great experience. I feel I have learnt a lot in this unit even though I would have liked more time to film, I know it's part of the challenge.