Directing - Evaluation

So, what went well in this project?

 To begin with, I am extremely proud of this project, as even through all the stress and late nights working things out, I’m really happy with the final piece overall.

I feel as a director I did well in getting exactly what I wanted from my actors on the filming day. And while it was very stressful arranging the actors, especially with the very last minute changes of the male actor dropping out a few days beforehand and one of my female actresses dropping out that morning, my remaining female actress, Alexandra, was very understanding with it being my first time directing. She was very kind and gave her all in her role. After filming was done we exchanged emails back a few times where we were both please with each other and both expressed interest in hoping to work with each other again.

When it came to the shots I wanted, I managed to get all of the ones I wanted, as well as some fantastic choices we decided to add in. Throughout editing, I kept in all the shots I wanted as they really helped to bring the edit to life.

During the editing process, Simon gave me feedback on how to improve my edit, and a few of the things he suggested was adding in sound effects to bring the scene to life just a bit more, as well possibly adding in either ambient background noise, or music – the latter of which I added in. While in the beginning I was worried as I noticed I hadn’t got many other shots aside from the tracking, wide and close-up’s, my style of editing and the why those shots held the tone of the scene made it much easier for those shots to stay in. When it came to the sound mixing, my worry about the audio was any feedback or humming from the mic, so, to cover this, I played the music track over the audio and only included audio from the scene when it was a focus on dialogue or sounds within the scene.

For me, I planning was seemingly okay in the beginning, but as it approached the middle of the planning stage I began to grow stressed due to the pressure of finding actors building up. But luckily, I was able to round my cast together and have old friends step in to help.

What Didn’t go well?

One of the biggest things I struggled things within this process was finding my cast. My ‘job’ posting wasn’t very successful to begin in, which only added in more pressure once I finally got two other cast members aside from Alexandra. It made matters worse once my male actor emailed me just a few days before to say he wouldn’t be able to make it, and then my other female actress, unfortunately, feeling ill that morning and was also unable to make it. That stress only leads to making everything else more stressful as it began to get overwhelming. Luckily, on the day, everything came together; it was just the stress of everything leading up to the day that made it very stressing and difficult for me.

An annoying problem I caught whilst editing was that in the ‘morning’ scene, I could adjust the scene to make it seem darker or moodier with any of the filters due to the room lights being on. I didn’t realize this until I got into editing, which meant the whole morning scene more of a yellowish tone to it, which isn’t something I wanted for my final piece, but, there was nothing I could do about it, so I had to leave it alone and make sure the rest of the film was as good as it could be.

Another thing that didn’t go so well was the time constraint on the filming day that I hadn’t planned for, initially I was planning to film from 11 in the morning until 6 in the evening so we had the most amount of time to film everything, and however, one of my crew had to leave earlier than initially planned.  This meant I didn’t manage to get all of the shots I wanted; however, the shots I got throughout the day were enough to form the scene.

What I learned:

For me personally, from this experience, I learned how to become confident as a director and working with other people who I don’t know – wich is an essential part of filmmaking / TV making. Alexandra seemed confident in my skills, and by the end of filming, we were all happy with the final result as well as my skills as a director. I’ve also developed my editing skills quite a bit, as on my old software, I never got the chance to play around with colour correction and filters – in all my eight years of editing, this is the first time I’ve worked with colour correction, and I really enjoyed it, it also helps me to realise that even a simple shift in the darkness or brightness of a scene can help pin the mood to how you want the audience to feel – another key aspect in storytelling on the either the big or small screen.

Planning was also a big eye-opener for me. I didn’t fully realise how much planning goes into ven a small production like this one. I now know in the future to plan well in advance of a project and plan for every outcome, good or bad, in order to avoid stress or last minute panics. But while this project was very stressful, it was all worth it for a piece of film that I really proud to call my own.

What would I develop and change for my next project?

For changing things, I’d probably have made sure to get all of the little detail shots done before doing the bigger more important shots so I have more footage to work in the final edit. I would have also liked to have done some more interesting shots, instead of just the basic, medium, close-up and wide shots, but again, these would have to factor into filming times and other factors of location pace and camera experience.

I really enjoyed this project, and although the stress and pressure got to me quite a few times, the overall end result of the final scene was truly rewarding as even I didn’t get all of the shots I wanted, I was still very happy with the end result!

Here is the final video of my remade scene - this film took about 5 hours to film and around a week to fully edit.