Grindleford Film Report
Katherine Muldowney
The process of creating our short film has presented me with a huge learning curve in regards to my understanding of the technicalities of film production; having little experience with the given equipment and software provided to us, I found this assignment very useful in providing me with the a solid idea of what goes into practical film-making.
In regards to the actual project, it took our group a short while to establish a solid idea of what we wanted to achieve. When we arrived in Grindleford, we had no idea what we were going to set out to capture; we had no solid plan, no scripts, storyboards, we didn’t even know if we wanted to have a narrative. Because of this, we used the time we had on the actual trip to explore the area, taking pictures and making notes, with the intention of coming back to Grindleford with a clearer vision of what we wanted to create.
The second trip to Grindleford, we went with a much clearer idea of of the footage we wanted to capture. We had sort of a loose narrative; we wanted to make the woodland setting seem like an other-worldly escape, this being the main theme of our film. We wanted to to focus on the sensual nature of the place; through touch, texture and sound. This was achieved to an extent, I think we managed to give our film a hint of a fantastic feel, although this turned out to be very subtle in my own opinion. In terms of the sensual side, I don’t think we managed to put this across enough for an audience to understand; although we managed to incorporate the touch and texture side, this wasn’t obvious enough for it to be seen in the bigger picture. Despite this, I think the footage we gathered showed a lot of potential for when it comes to editing.
The editing process, which was my designated role, was where most of the trouble with our project came in. As many of us came to find, Avid media composer was not without it’s problems and glitches. Added to that my inexperience with an industry standard software, learning how to edit using this programme was really a massive learning curve for myself and the rest of my group. We really had a group input when it came to editing, as we found quickly that we each had rather different views of how we wanted our film to look; creative differences soon began to erupt. In the end, we managed to incorporate different features and suggestions so that we were all happy with the end result. For example, it was suggested that we had a colour scheme (a filter) throughout the film, whereas I thought that this would be unnecessary given the environment that we had to film in. In the end, we decided against the coloured filter, but decided to incorporate different visual effects as suggested by the others in the group.
Overall, I am pleased with the outcome of our film. We managed to work through from having no clear aim of what we wanted to achieve, to having a solid and clear idea of our film. Tackling Avid was probably the biggest problem that we had to overcome, but I’m pleased to come away from this project with a basic knowledge of how the software works, and, have managed to produce a good piece given the difficulties we’ve had.
