Media Film Evaluation

This blog is here to host my evaluation for my Prelim Film Task in A-Level Media Studies. It'll have stills and annotations to complete the questions and evaluate what, how and why we have done what we have.

The film, 'The Robbery' was created by Rachel Luney and Sofia del Olmo, starring Philippa Godden and Rachel Luney (and the voice of Sofia).

We named it so, as it sums up what the film opening is about. After attempts to think of a clever title that actually made sense, we decided our temp name 'The Robbery' was good enough and fitted the best.

It was created over 3 weeks in the grounds of Gordano School. We completed a proposal form, a story board and a plan before being allowed to film and went on from there.

Our task was to create a shot opening included someone walking along a corridoor, opening a door, walking across the room to sit opposite another character and converse. We were alowed to take any direction with this task as long as it followed these guidelines and ours was inspired by the use of sneaking rather than walking. This developed into someone sneaking around and meeting someone in order to plan a robbery.

We knew we wanted an element of comedy in there somewhere, and didn't decide on what it would be until the main idea was sorted. It was obvious this comedic element would be fitted into the actual plan and what the characters wanted the steal. We brainstormed ideas and came up with an idea that related well to Gordano School.

Location:

• IT1
• Portland corridoor
• Stairs to business studies
• Corridoor between business
• Humanities stairs

Equipment:

• Video Camera
• Tripod
• Apple Macs
• Edited on iMovie
• Viewed on Quicktime

Before we started filming, we acted out the different shots and as new ideas came, we recreated them physically to see if they worked. On the search for a location, we needed somewhere that had a continuous cycle that we could use to sneak, walk and run through. The continuous loop was important as this allowed us to film with a flow, if the corridoor shots were taken if different places to make the scene seem longer, it wouldn't have looked as smooth or as realistic. However, we did shorted some of the tracking corridoor shots as the corridoor was too long and would waste time, therefore we used close-up shots to create this.

After filming, we uploaded the film onto the Macs and used iMovie to edit it. After several attempts to get it to work and to stop letterboxing, we managed to select the shots we thought were the best and ordered them before starting to cut them down. We had the idea for the opening from the beginning so it was easy to create this feel (I will talk about this later) but some of the shots didn't fit as well as we would have liked, therefore we decided to mix some, and it gave a desirable effect, despite the poor shots.

At the end of the film, we included some outtakes, although due to time restraints we couldn't cut them donw as much as we would have liked. We also missed out on adding the credits, which would have appeared accordingly to who was on the screen at the time.

The other posts here will be used for answering the questions and continuing the evaluation of 'The Robbery'.