CRITICAL EVALUATION

Lewis Hague

Critical Evaluation

 Throughout this critical evaluation, I will reflect on our finished group film by analysing the strengths, the weaknesses, our intentions and what I felt we have achieved. I will explore the learning process I have undergone whilst producing the film, discuss my individual contributions to the production, and more.

Before we even began to location scout, we sat down as a group to discuss and contribute our own ideas to the film we wanted to create. Tom, our director, stepped forward with a solid idea that we all thought would work.  Our intentions were to create a dark, poignant, ‘modern’ piece that featured our main protagonist on a rooftop, standing there about to jump off, committing suicide. Throughout the film, the audience would be shown flashbacks of how and why he’s ended up where he is.

Building upon this idea, we thought of ideas that could push the story even further. This included our main character (Chris), on a hospital bed in white clothing. Also, a scene in which we see Chris’s girlfriend cheating on him, and Chris walks in. All of these ideas were to be woven in to the main storyline to give the audience an understanding of the situation.

Our intentions however, were hard to achieve.

The final film we presented featured many weaknesses, as well as many strengths, however I feel obliged to admit that sadly overall, there are more weaknesses to our film, than strengths.

First off, I would like to discuss some of the locations that were featured in the film. Our intentions were to shoot in an old, ‘run-down’, messy apartment in a block of flats, however we ended up with a house. Of course the audience didn’t know where we intended to shoot, and on-screen fortunately the house location appeared fine, and tied in well with our piece. However for us, it was not the place we wanted.

Personally, I was disappointed with the sound. I felt it was incredibly over-whelming throughout the last two minutes of the film, and wasn’t necessary. At times the sound peaked too much and became muffled, as did some of the dialogue. I do appreciate that at times the muffled dialogue created enigma, and kept the audience guessing, however there were times where the dialogue was vital to the piece but unfortunately it was inaudible. For example when Chris replies to Liz with “But you do love me, don’t you?” whilst they’re arguing on the sofa. Alex had an interesting idea to increase the sound of the argument, whilst Chris was walking towards the door, however I’m not sure the technique was pulled off quite as effectively as we’d hoped. If I were to praise Alex, it would be that during the opening scene, the soundtrack/atmos’ really set the mood in an effective way. One in which drew the audience into the film, and made them want more.

You could say that the main downfall to our film was the acting. It’s unfortunate that one of the key aspects to a successful drama piece is the performance on-screen, and it didn’t pay off.  At certain points in our film, the performance from Chris was meant to come across as awkward, however it didn’t look as if we meant for it to be that way.

In this scene, Chris tries to subtly persuade Liz to move in with him. The intention was to create an awkward situation, one in which the audience could connect with.

There are maybe many reasons to why the performance was not as good as we’d hoped for, from the direction/understanding of them knowing what we wanted out of them, or to the fact they were only first years. But all in all, the acting is a definite downfall to our piece.

Carrying on with the weaknesses of our piece, I feel the art direction (as strong as it was in parts) could’ve been much stronger than it was. For example Tom H paid almost no attention to our female actresses and what they should wear for our scenes. Perhaps this is down to the director and the art director not collaborating with one another, I don’t know. For example, I would have dressed the character Jen in something red, to convey the image of a seedy, fiery, femme fatale character who was taking advantage of Chris.

Finally, I would like to discuss the cinematography. As I was the cinematographer for the project, I went into the project with a clear mind, open to trying out new and inventive techniques. I feel there are definitely some criticisms I would like to address, one being that the lighting in some of the shots is definitely over-exposed, and that quite a few of the scenes appear to be out of focus. During the scene shown below, the sunlight shone directly into the bedroom, and it was unpredictable as it kept going behind the clouds and back out again, meaning we had to go with any take we’d shot as we couldn’t waste any time waiting for the sun to go back in.

This shot, I am particularly proud of despite it being slightly too over-exposed. I chose to shoot this because it had connotations of Chris being trapped by Jen, and it portrayed Chris as small and fragile.

Moving on to the strengths of our piece, I thought in all, despite the weaknesses mentioned, we created a piece that came across as slightly abstract, which got the audience thinking. The mood and atmosphere was clear and it combined effectively with the visuals on-screen.

The visual edit to our piece I feel is near-faultless, there are no negative points I’d like to address and I feel that Natalie did a great job syncing the dialogue up with the visuals.

The cinematography I think is also a strong aspect of our film. As discussed earlier, I attempted to be open minded when approaching the process of creating the film, by creating shots that were visually pleasing and effective. A few of the shots I’m proud of are shown below.

 This shot was Tom's (the director's) idea. A hand-held track across the table with the couple in the background. It added a nice mood and tone to the piece.

In this shot, the contrast between black and red work well, with the red filling the screen and giving off the idea that bad things are about to happen.

 This was one of our master shots that we kept cutting back too. Throughout the shot we track inwards and Chris's face slowly gets in focus.

 This shot tracks backwards slowly as Chris approaches the camera. It shows off the industrial and scale of the location.

 This, being one of the final shots, works well in a way that the camera follows Chris's movement smoothly throughout the take.

The final shot I feel is simple, but effective; tracking backwards to reveal Liz standing there with the ring.

Other strengths to our film include the rooftop location, which Jess managed to organise, it provided us with the perfect ‘industrial’ feel, situated 12 floors up portraying the fear of vertigo.  The art direction concerning the character Chris was also well executed. Dressing him in white overalls allowed us to portray him on-screen as if he’s in ‘limbo’.

The process of making our film was difficult at times; we had many problems that we encountered from actors, to time restrictions, on-set problems and more.

The first major problem we encountered was not being able to find any actors/actresses. Jess had managed to find a couple of people, however they all dropped out the day before shooting. This was highly frustrating as it meant we couldn’t film anything until we’d gotten at least one actor. Eventually we found our leading actor, Hugh, who is a first year at Hallam. This wasn’t of much a concern as we were happy with any actor we could get our hands on. Jess struggled to find two female actresses, so she turned to Hugh to ask for help. Luckily Hugh knew two actresses who were happy enough to take part in our film.

Finding a location for the indoor scenes became a challenge. As we were unable to find a flat setting, we had to settle with Tom Hesford’s house. Upon arriving, all went well as we were setting up. But from then on, it unfolded into an absolute disaster. Tom’s housemates were constantly interrupting us, and the noises coming from upstairs meant Alex wasn’t able to record anything whatsoever. I did appreciate that it was their house, however Tom made no attempt to ask them to be quiet, at all. A full day of shooting wasted, we had no choice but to find another place to film on another day. Tom (the director) then stepped forward and said we could film in his house, and thankfully the re-shoot went much better than the first.

However it didn’t come without its problems either. Being under time-constraints was the main issue at hand on the day. Our actors were only available until the early afternoon, so we began filming bright and early. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt during the last year and a half on the course, is that you should never under-estimate the amount of time it takes to set up a scene, the lighting, the camera, and capture the shot. Because of the time-constraints, I wasn’t able to experiment as much as I’d have liked to, so we had to make do with the footage we’d captured. Another recurring problem was that I had next to no help with the lighting. I was capable of setting it up myself as I was the cinematographer, and Tom the director did help at times, however I felt that instead of the of the ‘crew’ sitting around doing nothing, they could’ve helped me, especially as we were pushing for time.

Despite all this, as a team I feel we worked effectively and efficiently together, we perhaps could have met as a group more often than we did to have a clearer view of what we were doing, but in the end it worked out fine. 

My individual contribution whilst being the cinematographer, was made up of tasks including the collaboration with the actors, telling them where to position themselves in terms of where the camera was, and co-working with Tom on telling the what we wanted out of each specific scene.

I set up most of the lighting/scenes with the help of Tom and a few others, and of course the camera for each scene and shot. For the shots we didn’t have time to storyboard, I spent a few minutes figuring out where the camera should be prior to shooting to get the most out of the scene.

I booked out the equipment/collected it every time we needed it, made sure we had the right equipment for the job in hand, and next to no problems occurred with the times we had the equipment for. Testing the equipment was also another task I had to take care of, there was one instance where a couple of the Dedo lights weren’t working, so I took them back and got them swapped the day before a shoot.

Other contributions include the obvious white balancing, and collaborating with the director to where the lighting should be in accordance to where the camera was. I also created floor plans for a few of the scenes, to show where the lighting, actors and camera should be.

It was fun engaging with the actors, showing them what I wanted from each shot.

As for references and influences, I never have a specific influence on my work, as I take the best aspects from most texts e.g. films, and find a way to incorporate them into my own. The texts however I have looked at recently include the film ‘DRIVE’ (2011), a film I find visually stunning and powerful. The cinematography is executed brilliantly and the style of the film is very gripping and poignant.

In conclusion, working on the project has been enjoyable, interesting, exciting and quite stressful. I don’t think our final piece is bad, I just think if given the opportunity again, we would have done a lot of things differently.

REFERENCES

DRIVE, (2011), Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn [Film], Icon Film Distribution.