Evaluation - Drama Piece

Overall I feel I have learnt a lot about filmmaking during the production of this drama piece, and its been an experience as a group to work together.

My role in the group was sound recording, however, I think one of the main reasons we worked well as a group was because we came to a compromise and helped each other out in our own job roles. For example, in post-production, I worked a bit on sound design. In the sound design role I helped review all the sound from the shooting days and add it to the timeline, replacing the camera’s recorded sound. That’s why I feel we worked well as a team. Solo did directing as well as acting, Ross helped with the editing as well as cinematography. And Ami-Lee and Rebecca also helped with sound recording as well as editing. I feel we learnt how to work well as a team during this project.

I feel the finished piece personally, was average. Although we worked well as a team, I don’t feel we were personally up to a high enough standard, as some of the editing is rushed. This is down to a few factors, as I feel we did leave too much work to the last minute. Our last filming day was 3 days before the deadline and we hadn’t even had edited a rough cut at this point. For future reference I think it’s important to make sure we start post-production as early as possible instead of leaving it until we have got all the footage.

In all fairness, we did have our constraints during production. One factor that did cause a massive hindrance was the fact we could not get access to one of our locations on shooting day. We planned to film at Hallam Hotel to get the scene of the main character talking to himself in a derelict location. However, this was off limits as police were on sight and didn’t want anyone on sight which ruled us out from filming there. Because we were set back an entire shooting day, it would justify why we were still filming 3 days before the deadline. I feel what I have learnt from this experience is next time we need to have a backup location just in case we can’t get access to the main location, especially if it is not totally 100% legal to film there.

Another factor is my time-management. During the production of this drama piece I was involved in another project. However, filming days overlapped each other and while there was pressure on me to complete my job role in the other project, it put unnecessary pressure on the drama too. What I can take from this, is that in future I need to learn to get better at time management, so I can successfully work on two projects at the same time.

Overall this drama piece was a massive learning curve for me as a film maker. We can agree as a team we didn’t produce the best film we possibly could, but we learnt a lot about the filmmaking process in general.