ASSESSING - CHASING SHADOWS

This lesson we are filming the last few scenes for our film.
The experience of filming has taught us that it isn't at all easy to perfect the scenes shot.

Initially, we had decided that the genre of our film would be a romantic comedy about a teenage boy - Marcus Mensah, played by Bernard Mensah - who finds the girl of his dreams, but isn't good enough for her. 

The boys in our group, Bernard Mensah and Mohammed Madey were eager to undergo filming a romantic comedy. They believed it would be a 'piece of cake'. However, after advice from our teachers and peers we decided to change the genre of our film to a Psychological Thriller as this was thought to be an easier genre to film.

From A Romantic Comedy 

To A Psychological Thriller 

 

ISSUES WITH: ROMANTIC COMEDY 

The issues that came up about the Romantic Comedy was that, aspects that we find humorous may not be funny to the audience. We realised that comedy is a very difficult genre to grasp, especially with the short time we have to film. We knew we would not be able to fulfil the concept of comedy properly. Moreover, we established that we would not be able to portray the idea of 'love' perfectly,
(After all, we are teenagers).
Firstly, this is because we could not find a female lead that was comfortable with the storyline of our film, plus we knew that we would not be able to make our characters fit their profile ideally. 

Therefore...

We changed the storyline of our film and kept the main character - Marcus Mensah. Instead of a story about 'love', we agreed that we would make the film bout Marcus being trapped in college with a threatening figure. ( A Killer) who is played by Mohammed Madey. We believed that this would be fairly easy to film. Stereotypically, a killer is a dominant figure, someone who is 'unknown'. We had all that. This would be a 'piece of cake' - or so we thought. 






Infact...

It was not. It wasn't a 'piece of cake' at all. We had to film several shots over and over again because of little mistakes we had made without noticing. Initially, we wanted to shoot our film in the dark, which would be after college hours. But - that didn't work out. It didn't fit with our schedule. Also, it'd be difficult to see our characters if the setting is too dark. So - lighting was a problem. Secondly, how on earth do we set up the coming of horrific events in the space of two minutes???
We seriously didn't know how to set up the full storyline of our film. We thought we had an idea, but it turned out that there was too much happening in the beginning, so the question ' What's going to happen in the rest of the film?' came up. Then reality hit us. This isn't easy, I mean, did we even think this through properly? Were struggling with two minutes of footage! Boy, do I feel sorry for people who make films out there. But then again, they have EVERYTHING  they need. We were thinking too big. I guess we didn't realise that this was a low budget film. 


So...

We changed a few things. We cut a few bits out, and added other scenes that make a little more sense. This set us back a little, as we were still filming, while others had started editing. It was a little disappointing. But hey, things did get better. After our film was half edited, it did make more sense, and it did look better than before. 

THERE YOU HAVE IT - CHASING SHADOWS.