Rory Giddings

Evaluation:

During the filming of our TV Crime Drama trailer we experienced many different problems of filming that appeared to be successful and some things that were not. I will also be inspecting the different stages that we faced and the difficulties we had to overcome. The people in my group were Andrew, Matt, Stan, Jordan and I.

Pre – Production:

We started our planning with a messy and complex mind map of ideas for our TV cop drama and when we finished I compared with the other members in my group. The ideas that feature below form my mind map, but however none of my ideas were transferred to the screen, as these are just purely ideas.

However, we started filming we needed to firstly take a look at TV cop dramas themselves. For example; we evaluated CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a TV cop drama and looked at different conventions used in the episode we

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watched. We looked at sound, mise-en-scene, characters and other elements of it. Below is an extract from the group’s synopsis.

“A man named James is walking down a dark, windy and quiet alley, when he is suddenly struck on the head and then wakes up in a dark room with one dimly lit light. His captor is a psychotic loan shark who is owed money by James. Eventually James cannot give up the money so is simply shot in the head by the evil loan shark. His body is dumped in a field. It is found by a farmer who quickly calls the FIB’S.”

Transferred our ideas and lines onto a story board, here it is below…

My storyboard is pretty weak due to the shameful “I was in a rush!” type drawings but all the information is there, for example the type of camera shots, the dialog (if any) and how long the shot will take (not exact). The storyboard is important due to it being the only source of how things will look. When you look back at your storyboard it is both enjoyable and annoying. It is satisfying to see the scenes and shots that were produced according to plan, however when you see other planned

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scenes it annoys you because you wanted to do it exactly in that way and also it would have probably worked better.

Shot 1 was planned to have been shot on a long and dark pathway but there was nowhere like that in school so in the end we decided to go with this bike shed as it was a little more interesting for a man getting clubbed round the head in an opening scene.

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Much time, effort and equipment along with many props were used during the stages of filming. These consisted of:

• Plastic Revolver

• Nikon Film Stills Camera

• Filming video camera

• Mobile Phones

• Plastic P99

• Tripod

• Coats

• Tie used as gag

• Desks and tables

• Computer

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• Suit and Tie

• Science Equipment

• Goggles

• Container test tubes

• Scientific Laboratory

• Books

• Chairs

• Boxes

Above is a list of everything that we planned to use during pre – production and we used all of the items indicated during the filming.

Production

After what felt like years, we were able to start the filming. With all of our planning and brainstorming we could now bring that to screen. We had positive teamwork during our filming and everyone mucked in. We got on well and had no problems. Most of the time when trying to film someone would laugh and we couldn’t film for another eight minutes due to our annoying laughter. It was highly disrupting for our production as it put us far behind, we lost about 15 minutes altogether! But it made the experience more positive for them I guess. I was just getting a bit fed up if I’m honest.

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The first is a first person camera shot (also known as ‘point of view’ because that is the proper way of establishing the camera. It’s effective because it gives you a feeling of the character himself and what he is feeling at that particular time.

Post – Production

which I was highly concerned about. To do this we used Adobe Premier. Personally I feared and hated using this nightmare of a program as it was very difficult to work with, the amount of things you can do on it are scary. Editing for me meant putting together all of the clips filmed into the correct order and uploading them onto Premier. The music that I chose before anything else was the Godfather theme tune. This was done to join the music with the story as the main guy is a member of the Mafia therefore music like the Godfather would be highly fitting appropriate. Also I slowed down that scene to create meaning and I think it worked well as it made you focus better on the characters.

To summarise, we showed our class member my trailer and gained feedback from our other students and it appeared that the majority said that the sound effects and special effects seemed to be the weakest point in the trailer. However the action and the story seemed to be the strongest feature in the trailer.

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Feedback:

Story S S SCamera Work SEditing SMusic S S SSound EffectsSpecial EffectsTitles S S SDoes it look like a crime drama? S S S

Story WCamera Work W WEditing W WMusic WSound Effects W W WSpecial Effects W W WTitlesDoes it look like a crime drama?W = Weakness S = Strength

What improvements could be made?

-“IT NEEDED DIFFERENT MUSIC BECAUSE IT CREATED A ROMANTIC VIBE LIKE THE TITANIC.”

-“COULD OF ADDED SOUND OR SPECIAL EFFECTS”

-“It needed more features in it. Like special effects, and probably faster music.”

-“The editing wasn’t great.”

Rory Giddings