Short Drama Evaluation
Evaluation
This project consisted of 2 parts; script writing and short drama’s. In Script writing with Michael Ellis, we firstly had to think of a story. I came up with an idea to do with zombies. Originally my idea was about a radio presenter waking up in his studio to a zombie apocalypse. Realising his wife had left a number of frantic calls, it dawns on him that he could have possibly losses her. Being saved by 3 strangers, Kevin is taken to a nearby camp. Once we had our act 1,2 & 3 planned out, we than had to pitch it to Tim Cubitt, Michael Ellis and Graham Gladin. Personally I Found this part quite nerving but think i done ok. Once this part was over, all three of our teachers discussed everyones short drama idea’s and picked the top 6. My script was one of the chosen but i sat down with my tutors and discussed some changes that had to be mad, one being to simplify. I agreed with this as my original idea was quite huge especially regarding all the Mise-En-Scene. I then came up with the idea of having a husband and his zombie wife. Kevin tries to go about his day to day life as normal as possible in hope of his ‘zombie’ wife, Katy, to remember or recognise anything. Having the log line of ‘Can he kill his wife even if she is already dead’?
We then had to go off and write our scripts. We made our rough copy then went through it with our assigned script writing tutor and made any changes that was need. During the script writing process our three tutors choose 6 Directors they felt was right for each individual script. I got chosen to direct the script Premonition written by Lucy Daniels.
Premonition was about a teenage girl who started to have premonitions therefore knowing what someone is going to say before they say it or another scene is of her best friend knocking a cup off the table, but her hand is waiting there ready to catch. As a director i had to sit down and decide who i felt was right to produce this script with me. I choose Herbert George to be my D.O.P, Ellen Bailey and Emma Hawkins my production managers. Once i sat down with my crew, we went through the script and discussed weather its achievable and i wanted to make some changes with them.
Throughout the pre-production stage Ellen Bailey was on point, she took charge of majority of the paperwork with me at hand to help. Each time Ellen completed a piece of paperwork, she informed me so i knew we are on schedule. I produced the story board with Emma and Herbert at hand to help me. We then sat down as a crew and discussed possible locations, we agreed we would use Ellen house as it was possible to film everything there. We then discussed our actors, i explained to the group that theres a website called ‘CastingCallPro’ where we can advertise our student project to professional actors for free and then myself and Emma held auditions and felt the Jenny Wills and Grace was perfect.
I felt that i had to be quite strict on filming as we used professional actors one of which had to travel from the other side of London. It only took us 2 full days of filming but all members of my crew were amazing, always on bull and giving different ideas in regards to cinematography and Mise-En-Scene. Myself and Ellen and Emma shared the role of sound man and Herbert and Emma had their own Black Magic camera to shoot on with me over looking the shots. I took charge on lighting with everyone on hand to help. Overall we all felt we done quite well on shoot considering we was on a time schedule.
Once we got to post-production, i completed the entire edit. I then asked Herbert and Emma to complete the audio levels and colour correction due to myself editing another video. However once Herbert got to college to finished the short drama all our footage had disappeared from the hard drive. Both myself and Herbert looked everyone and on every hard drive to see if someone had moved it and had no luck. we came to the conclusion that someone had either deleted our footage or done so my accident but this didn't help us as we and out actors had put so much hard work into that and personally it looked really good.
After talking to Tim Cubitt we had no choice but to join another group (who’s footage also went missing) to film their script Heart Z (which i had written). We all literally had ran out of time so we had to film in one day. I managed to get one of my best friends who is a professional actor to play Kevin and the other group got our female. Myself and Aaron directed this shoot together, both filmed amongst the rest of the crew and Aaron done the audio. I think, considering we had no time left we done extremely well but do believe we could have done much more footage if we had longer time.
Overall this project has been a rollercoaster which started out smoothly then went down hill. But i think considering our footage went missing and we had to improvise, we kept calm and pushed through all barriers as a team.
