Evaluation

Our film is caused Straight out of Compton. A parody on the title of the NWA song of a similar name but while their song is based around Compton in Boston, ours is based around Compton in Britain. The movie was originally intended to be planned Straight outta Compton but this had due be changed to to potential copy write issues with the movie that was coming out soon after we thought of this title.   

I think that our movie was creative and original as what was wanted in the brief. One of the reasons that I believe that it fulfills these criteria because of the interesting shots we were able to include in the section of the movie that was shown. As we had limited resources available to us while doing this we were still able to make several imaginative shots, for example using a Go-Pro to film point-of-view shots from our main characters, like Rhys' escape and Tom's death, this is creative because it adds a personal side to the action due to the audience being able to see what the character can see and puts them in the boots of the character that we see the scene from. In addition to this our filming location is creative as many other movie don't use the school setting that we have used. This helps our movie be creative as we are then able to use the classrooms and other sites in the school to be able to show a wide range of scene setting without having to travel. Our group did use the setting available to us but we could have used these to more effect as we only ended up filming in four different locations (the classroom, the staircase, the woods and the road) but we could have used many more.

I think that our film is different than what was originally planned as we did not follow the shot list and missed several scenes. During filming we forgot to follow the originally planned shot list and so, while similar it is not the same as planned. Although it did lose the pre-planned structure it did give us more freedom to film how we want, for example we were able to have more point of view shots using the Go-Pro. The missed out scenes were chosen not to be filmed as we feel they were not needed. As we had limited time in which all members of the group were able to film we had to choose several scenes not to film. One example of the scenes dropped is the planned end scene in which  Rhys and Ivan were meant to be discussing how to get back but we felt that it would be better to leave the film as a cliffhanger with George chasing Rhys as this would leave suspense and keep the audience wondering what will happen after the extract ends. I think by doing this we further filled put the brief because it was more creative and original by having no insurance that the characters would survive after the film ends. Another change that we made was by not having as many extras as originally planned. We did this because` we felt by having the heroes outnumber the villain and still having the heroes be scared, it would make the villain (George) seem more threatening. If there were several gangsters helping George it would both be harder to organize filming times and George would seem less powerful so we decided not to use the extras. Overall I thinks that our changes did improve our product as we were able to tell the story that we wanted in the extract and made it easier to coordinate, giving us more time on each scene we filmed.

In the planning phase I contributed because I was a major part of the story boarding process. We planned out our movie mainly using story boarding and every member of our group helped with this process, each adding into the extract's plot and the shots we used. Furthermore I made the risk assessment for the group which helped s acknowledge and avoid the possible risks to our production crew. During the production phase I was a main actor until I died during the attempted escape, after this I helped as as camera man. For the post production process I was the sole editor so I put all of the scenes we had filmed together and I cut out parts that were not usable, for example much of the audio had background sound that would have not fitted in with the film, so by cutting the audio and replacing it with music I was able to avoid this problem.

One strength of our pre-production was the storyboard's made. I felt that this was strong because every member in the group participated in the making of this leading to a storyboard that everyone was happy with the story we had produced and the scenes we had planned to film. This was a strength because if one person had done all of the story boarding the other members of the group would not know what to expect in the scene filmed and so in the pre-production tasks there could have been several different ideas of what was going to happen, which would have weakened this part of production.A strength of the production process of our film was the several different camera angles and shots we were able to include in the section filmed. One example of the several types of shot used was in Thomas' death as we first used a point of view shot as Thomas rounded the corner and saw George, then a close up of Ivan's face as he is crying over his friend. A post production strength was the music that I was able to include in the film. Most of the scene's filmed either had no need for audio or the audio was not usable due to background sound but to fix this problem I was able to find copyright free music that fit the pace of what was happening in the shots. This made the movie better because the synchronous sound will get the viewer in the mood that we intend.

In our product there were several areas for improvement. One area for improvement would have been organizing our filming times better during the production stage. During one of our filming sessions we were not able to get Ivan as he was busy with other work, who was a lead actor in the planned scene, so we needed to just film Rhys. This was all of the section after Ivan's flashback. Because of our organisational problems I believe that our product lost some of the quality we were aiming for. During the post production process due to technical problems we lost the ability to use some of the filmed scenes: these were a scene were Rhys and Ivan plan there escape and a tracking shot of Rhys as he is running away. Both of these would have majorly improved the end product but as we were not able to use them we lost this ability. A third area for improvement would have been stopping other sound coming in. Because of the amount of extra sound in most scenes audio had to be cut in every scene but one. This made the film seem less realistic as music covered most diegetic sounds.