Story Telling - Analysis of unit

Through out this unit the ideas for my short piece have changed multiple times and I have encountered a fair amount of challenges pre and post filming. The first problem wasn't really a problem, more a development of ideas. I changed my first idea that was about a young girl who is killed in the woods not far from her school. There were a few challenges immediately pointed out by Simon,

1. It was based in America so I would have to find people who could do accents
2. It involved quite a small girl so trying to find a young girl who can act would be challenging
3. The storyline is that when the girls murder is announced over the media the town turns on a homeless man who has been known to wander the woods. He is taken in for questioning but his mental health is degrading. In the end it turned out that a teacher at the school the girl went to had killed her in the woods. This is a quite complex storyline especially for 10 minutes, but Simon also raised the question of what I would do to make it stand out from other murder films, as this "innocent been accused" take had already been done before.

So I decided to change my story and involve less characters as well as less locations. To keep the story as simple and easy to tell as possible, decreasing the chance of complications. My new storyline was a boy comes home from school, gets changed, packs a bag and goes off to the woods to make a rope swing, but no matter how hard he tries it doesn't work. Until and old man from a house adjacent to the woods had seen his difficulties and decides to help him. By the end of the day after teaching the boy some knots he learnt in the Navy the rope swing is finished and he gets to have a swing on it. It's good fun but his mum phones him asking him to come home for dinner, so he says his fair wells to the old man and is on his way until he remembers some of the things the old man had said and believes he is going to hang himself. He runs back and the man hasn't hung himself which embarrasses the character and relieves he audience.

This seemed like a more feasible storyline to shoot, the woods were down the road from where I live and there were only two characters. I thought the location permissions would be the hardest part of the shoot as it isn't owned by council like a normal piece of public property, it is under the protection of the Kent wildlife trust.  However it came to light that when actually preparing for the shoot, the hardest part was finding actors, but when I finally found a family friend and a friends younger brother who said they would do it they pulled out the evening before the shoot. NOT GOOD. So I scrambled together some friends and decided that I had to shoot something as that would be better than coming back with nothing, but fate had other ideas. I had the camera equipment packed in the car and was waiting outside while a friend was getting ready and the heavens opened, big time. So considering the only place I had permission to film was an outdoor location we called it off that day. The next morning came, the last day I had to get any footage, so I went out borrowed a sleeping bag and filmed a storyline I had created the night before. The premise of the story was that there were two brothers, going on a camping trip to enjoy the views and have fun bonding etc. Only that the older brother is actually dead, died years ago and the younger brother's mind is constructing an imaginative camping trip. so he wakes up the next morning next to an empty sleeping bag and has flashbacks of opening the car door to nothing and walking alone talking to himself.  The lesson from this would be either use proper actors from an agency or get someone who can not say they can't make it e.g a sibling.  

The next week I found out we could re-shoot so I decided to stick to the first two minutes of my script as I would not have enough time to request a film permit for the woods again before the deadline. I shot all the angles I wanted and the actor did not pull out. Unfortunately when I was telling my friend how to use the TASCAM I neglected to tell him to press record before every take, so my re-shoot had no audio to it. This was quite a big problem as it took me a fair amount of time to dub my voice over and it makes the video poorer quality.

Also because the camera hadn't recorded any sound there was no atmospheric or background noise e.g. cars going past, footsteps or doors closing, so I had to try and record and download sounds and then slow them down or speed them up to fit the picture in frame.