Sophie pellings evaluation

EVALUATION

The film that we have produced is based around the idea of a teenage love story. We have taken the idea of a girl having a boyfriend and breaking up and then her being left alone and not knowing what to do with herself because she is overwhelmed by loneliness. We have made an extract of the film which is made in the form of a montage showing her in different places sitting/ standing on her own. The montage also includes a few shots of groups of people and couples because it is showing that she is showing that she is envious of these people.

Within my group I acted as the editor and I also acting in the montage as the lonely girl. Being the role of editor I had to put all of the different clips in the right order in order to make the rough cut of the montage and then also to make the final cut of the film. Whilst doing the editing of the rough cut to make it our final piece, i had to use final cut to fade each scene into one another and smooth the fading to make the cutting of the different scenes flow together. In the editing there is one specific scene of an old couple which has been layered onto another scene set in the same place to show the effect that it is now as though she doesn’t exist anymore and that she is invisible. This particular scene starts of showing the girl on her own and then fades to the same place but the girl is no longer there but has been replaced by an old couple now walking towards the camera, if i was able to redo the fade on this shot i would slow the fade down so that it shows the overlapping of the girl walking away and the couple walking towards and a bit more, I would also make it so that the 2 shots of the same place where exactly in line so if the fade was slower it would match up exactly.

Some of the influences that helped us while we were making the short extract of a film were the opening of “Love Actually”(Richard Curtis) where the shots flick between different couples showing all the different loves that are around. Another film influence was “500 days of summer”(Marc Webb) and the scene where the main character dances around joyfully because he is so happy because the shots flick from one place to another so quickly, we took the idea of putting lots of different shots together to make a montage of all different places showing that she is alone even in public places, and it seems as though everywhere she goes is only her and she is completely deserted from the rest of the world. As the screen shots below show, we filmed in public places to put emphasis on the fact that while everyone else around her are with their friends in groups, she would rather be on her own because without her boyfriend she doesn’t want anyone.

We decided to do a montage of scenes showing a girl left alone because her boyfriend and her have broken up and then also scenes of couples that she is now envious of. The idea of doing this montage is to show the idea of a girl being alone and now envious due to a recently nasty break up. This montage extract would come just before the climax of the movie just after the breakup of the couple.

A montage is suppose to consist of a series of short scenes that are put together to tell its own little narrative and express emotion and feeling. Normally a song plays throughout the whole of the montage which helps to add to the feeling of the montage and helps to create an atmosphere.

The sound track that we have used over the top of the entire extract creates the feeling of regret/loneliness. We used the song “airplanes by local natives” i think that this was a good choice of song because it includes the lyrics “I want you back” throughout which is relevant to the story that the extract is showing.

Most of the audience feedback was positive about the editing saying that it was cut and put together well, but there were a few negative comments about the over using of fade, but the reason that i used the fade to get between each different clip was to roughly show the passing of time.

Evaluation - Chloe Davidson

I worked as the director in our group for our film sequence. Our film is a teen love movie about a young girl who leads a perfectly normal life until she falls in love. This starts a sequence of events, good and bad, that change her life over the course of a year. The extract that we shot would go in towards the end of the film, before the climax. The girl has realised that there are consequences to all of the things she has done and because of this she is alone.







A screen grab from our montage showing the girl alone

While 500 Days of Summer (Marc Webb 2009) and Love Actually (Richard Curtis 2003) are not in the same genre as our film, we took a lot of influence from them as they both feature montages. The opening of Love Actually is a montage of clips of people at an airport hugging and kissing and talking. It showed love. Originally we wanted our sequence to be similar to this. We were going to have lots of shots of the public that gave an impression of love, overlapped into a montage. We also planned to have the girl to do a voice over saying how love is this thing that everyone wants and thinks is amazing and incredible, but it hasn’t been that way for her. The sequence would have ended with a shot of her from behind, slowly panning out. We wanted this to be at the beginning of the film, introducing the character and the story. However, when we begun filming we realised that it was quite difficult to get specific shots of the public. We tried shooting in the town centre but it wasn’t busy enough and we couldn’t find enough couples that were acting ‘in love’. We got some friends to pretend to be together so we could get some shots but we ended up not having enough for a whole 2 minute sequence. Instead, we changed the concept and included shots of the girl alone to contrast with the couples. However, there are still a range of different shot types in the Love Actually montage which we took inspiration from for our sequence.

A example of a shot from Love Actually that we took inspriation from in our montage

During editing, we also decided to use music to get the girls message across instead of a voice over. For this, we looked at 500 Days of Summer. In this film the central protagonist does a celebratory dance along to piece of music as an expression of his happiness. This sequence stands out in the film and we wanted our montage to have the same effect.

This is a screen grab showing how we layered up sound effects and music ontop of our footage

The final extract is a montage showing the girl on her own. She’s featured walking, sitting and standing in different locations, but she is always shown being alone. There are also short clips in the sequence of groups of people, couples and friends who are happy to contrast with the girl’s loneliness. The purpose of the montage was to create a sense of depression for the character and to generate a sad response from the audience. I feel that this has been successful and the audience reacted exactly how we wanted them to.

I acted as the director for our group and had to set up our actress and the scene to ensure our cinematographer got the best shots. The first thing I had to do was plan the sequence shot by shot on a story board and decide where each one was being filmed by scouting out locations. We knew that we wanted the main character to be alone in the shots so I purposely chose places where there wasn’t likely to be crowds, such as back streets, alleyways and fields. I also tried to get some shots in places where you would expect there to be lots of people to show that the girl still felt alone even when she was surrounded by people. Our cinematographer managed to get some shots like this in the town centre and in a local park. We needed crowd and couple shots to contrast with the lonely girl and so we mainly filmed these in busy public places. In addition to this, I made sure that the costumes we used were true to the character. For example, Sophie, our actress, wore a typical teenage outfit; jeans, a jumper, UGG boots and a coat. I chose this because I wanted it to seem like the character could be any of the real life girls who walk down the street. There aren’t any bright colours in the pieces of clothing either. This was a conscious decision. The clothes were all dark and dull colours like blacks, greys and blues to show that the girl was feeling sad and upset. In my role as director, I also had to position Sophie in each shot, make sure the lighting was ok, approve each camera shot, watch over the post-production and editing and try to get the best out of my team.

I positioned Sophie in the left hand side of the shot to show that the scene was from her perspective

Given more time, I think I could have ensured our group got a better variety and a better quality of shots as it was hard to get good shots in such a public setting and in such a short amount of time. This would have allowed us to develop the montage and the narrative more and to guarantee that we’d made a piece to the best of our ability. However, I do think that this project has been a success and I am proud of the final outcome. Finally, I have enjoyed learning about the different aspects of film making, in particular directing, and also working with others who share a passion for film like me.

Screen grabs from the film for evaluation.

This shows a couple embracing this is to create a sense of jealousy.














Sound effects used in the film to create a sense of the girls surroundings.


The girl is on the left hand side of the screen, this is to show that the shot is in her perspective. she is walking towards the light.