Production Diary - The Benefit of Hindsight

Back in Easter, a couple friends and I entered a national competition to create a short film in the science fiction genre in the space of forty-eight hours. We were given the title ('Strange Attractor') a prop (A black box - to be opened but we couldn't see what was inside) and a line of dialouge that had to be included.

The end result is below.

I'm proud of what we created in that time and I feel the story worked really well for the format.

Looking forwards to comencing production of the next short film I will make, I've decided it's worth looking back to examine what worked well and what didn't.

The first thing that I would have done differently is adjusting the exposure - everything is a lot brighter than I'd have liked. I do know now how to do that properly and will definitely be able to fix it for Brew.

Also, I'd like to place a focus on developing the frame compisition -  having to deal with actors of very different hieghts resulted in a few odd angles, as well as a total disregard of the rule of thirds - the technique that suggests that there are places to objects of interest to make the frame more aesthetically pleasing.

During directing, the main thing I'll take away is that it's good to do as many takes as possible, and keep in mind how it will be edited. Using only one camera meant that I had to get the actors to repeat the majority of the takes in order to enable succesful editing. What I'd like to be able to work on next time is making the final product look 'fluid' and less choppy, which can be achieved by having more takes to choose between and monitoring the actor's movements. The 'choppy' editing is evident earlier on in this video where we were doing shorter takes - later on we moved to longer ones, and I feel that did work better.

One other thing that I am proud of is the variation of shots - there is a wide range presented, with a purpose. I especially like the low angle shot with the box in focus and the two characters arguing in the background (1:37). We even desaturated the shot in Premier in order to make it look different and stand out from the other shots.

Making Strange Attractor was great fun and a great experience and I'm glad to have done it, as it has given me some pointers to make my final product short film as good as possible.