Commission placement - Evaluation

What went well?

Shortly after our briefing, I went back to the messages Sebastian, which reminded me about a music video he was looking for someone to do to, and, as this was a unit where this would fit in, I decided to do it.

As with commission, it was about what the client wanted, I asked Sebastien what ideas he wanted for the video, and after he gave me some thoughts about his vision, I took them further and created both a video script and storyboard. I showed him the video script at first to make sure he was happy with the detailed ideas I had come up with for the video. The story I had created was a girl who was suffering from mental health issues, who after a final straw, took her own life and ended in purgatory where she meets death, embracing him and accepting her own passing.

However, we also both decided that the video wouldn't be too explicit in showing her passing away as we didn't want to video to trigger anyone.

These ideas went really well with the briefing that Sebastien had given me, which was important as the video would reflect the message of the song, so it needed to be right.

Shooting on the day also went very well, even under the cold and wet weather conditions. We had a great actress on-set and she was great at taking direction, making it easier to shoot as the video was completely performance based. I feel I had good communication with her and we managed to get all the shots we wanted within the first few takes.

What didn't go well?

From the start, it seemed we were troubled by multiple different things. We initially planned to film almost a month before the date we actually filmed, but due to changes with location and finding crew/cast, we had to move it to the next week of December, however, once again to crew and cast not being free, we hd to move. While in that week I had managed to gather crew and cast, none f them were free for the day I had moved to, so, I have to move dates twice, one move was from the 21st to the 20th due to our actress not being free that day and then I had to move it to the 2nd of January as our location was shut over the Christmas period.

This was partly my fault as I could have gotten into contact with my location sooner and found cast quicker, but I relied too heavily on hoping to get cast/crew from my university class, which held me back as I didn't decide to look for cast until the 19th, 2 weeks after I initially wanted to film.

Another problem which was most likely down to me, was that the camera wasn't at the greatest quality while filming, something I didn't realise until I went into editing and it was also something that I couldn't fix. The grain on a lot of the scenes were incredibly bad, ruining some of the clips we had as the grain was too distracting. This was a big problem as even though it was grainy and didn't look too bad in post, it was only when I rendered and exported my video that I realised ho bad the grain actually was on a couple of the big scenes and it looked horrendous.

Develop and changes:

If I had to do this project again the first thing I would do is look straight for crew and cast and not focus on asking people from my class as this cost me a lot of time and caused stress when I could have gotten crew/cast early and not be as panicked or stressed when it came to the filming day.

Another thing I would change about my film is my attention to the camera settings and to make sure that the grain was either low or none was there as I feel if there was no grain, it wouldn't have been so damaging to the video.

Overall, I enjoyed doing this project as it enabled me to create a different type of media then I am used to, but I would certainly make sure to focus on outside cast/crew first before anything to avoid stress or panic later on.