DepicT!: Production evaluation

Production evaluation 

Here is our finished production of L'espirit Noir followed by my evaluation of mise-en-scene, editing, sound and camerawork.

When it came to filming our production we had to delay due to extremely bad weather and improvise with our production schedule. Due to the weather we had to be extra careful whilst filming as the ground was slippery, which was on risk assessment.

Camera Work

Within the production, the camerawork was generally okay, a bit shaky at some points but that was due to having to use a broken tripod. I tried to capture a variety of different shots such as  POV shot, medium shot, close up and over the shoulder shots. Apart from having to add and switch round a few scenes we managed to follow our storyboard fairly well.

Our first scene features a close up shot of the detective's (Jade Medley) face with a blind effect (which I made on Photoshop) over her face. We used this to symbolise that she is stuck or in someway trapped. In this case it shows that she's stuck on a case. She is holding a glass of whisky and looking out of the window which also could symbolise that she is troubled. after this shot, the soundtrack fades in which was composed by Connor. 

The next shot backs up what we were trying to symbolise through the glass and the blind effect as it shows a stack of paperwork, continuing from this shot, there is a medium shot that shows the detective moving towards and looking at the paperwork.  The camera panning from one side of the room to the other as someone walks into the room towards the detective. We see a medium shot of these characters exchanging a photograph. Unfortunately there is a slight delay with the pan and  a slight shake as the tripod we used has slight technical difficulties, as I stated earlier. 

We ended this scene with a over the shoulder shot of the detective turning over the Polaroid over to find a name of a park. The scene then fades out along with the soundtrack.

The second scene fades in showing a opening of a forest, panning upwards from the floor, the soundtrack fades in from the previous track. In the next shot we used a medium shot to capture the detective entering the forest from, the detective then takes the photo from her pocket and looks at it, checking the location is correct.

In the next shot we have a long shot following the detective going further into the forest, in this shot there is a in-camera sun flare either side of the shot, the reason I did this was symbolise that there is something dark and evil in the innocence. It also shows the viewer that it is sunny and it is at some point during the day but because of the darkness added in the edit it makes it feel eerie.

In the next few shots, the detective is seen to find a dead body, we have a close up shot of the detectives face to show that she is shocked as well as distressed. There is then a point-of-view shot of murderer 2 (Stuart Fulcher) running through the trees. We did this by panning in the opposite way of which Stuart was running then sped up the shot on Premiere Pro.

Mise-en-scene

In this short we had two locations/scenes, one in a forest and the other an indoor scene.
The first scene was set up like a typical office suitable for a detective. Using the lighting equipment available I focused it in certain positions to make the room look quite dark and mysterious so then it would fit in with our hybrid genre. We chose to place empty alcohol bottles, stacks of paper work and a old telephone on the deck that what the main focus of the scene. We did this to symbolise that the detective is somewhat troubled with a certain case.

The costumes represents the character's roles pretty well, it was difficult to find a costume for a film noir style detective due to our budget and limited resources due to size of clothing ad not personally owning certain items that we may of needed leaving us to rely on the costumes here at college.
I personally think that the 'killers' masks were quite tacky as were the fake weapons but as I said before due to budgeting our choices were limited.

Editing

We used Premiere pro to edit our short. Starting with the first scene, we began with cutting our shots down so then they matched the times we had written down on our storyboard. We then layered a black and white effect with colour correction giving it an almost sepia tone to it and added a little noise to each shot to make it grainy to make it look more like a film noir. For the first shot I created the blind effect on Photoshop on a transparent background then edited it further on Premiere pro to make it look more like a shadow and more subtle.  We then added the soundtrack to fit each shot.

With the second scene we added the colour effect to each shot, cut down each shot to fit our storyboard, just like we did for the first scene. When watching the second scene with all the shots with the correct timings and in the right place, we noticed that two shots didn't fit together properly and caused a jump cut. We tried everything to make it run more smoothly but in the end we had to and extra shot in to break it up, it still didn't look completely right but it was the only thing we could do without having to go out and re-shoot the shot. We then added the soundtrack for the second scene and added all of the sound effects for both scenes.

Sound

When it came to sound in our short we made a group decision that there would be no dialogue, just a soundtrack and sound effects, this was to make it seem mysterious, leaving the viewer to question what's going to happen. All sound used in our production is completely copyright free as the soundtrack was composed by Connor and all of the sound effects were legally downloaded of a website called Freesound.org. As there is no dialogue, the sound helps set emotion within the short as well as help tell the story and luckily it fits the majority of the shots as it was composed before we started editing.