The Disaster That Was Pre-Production, Production and Post-Production of My Group Project

As the deadline for my group project drew ever closer my group decided to make several changes to our project so that it would be a little easier to create and also to fit inside the 5-8 minute length requirement. We kept the theme of the story but got rid of the three separate narratives that meet at the climax of the film idea as it would require to many actors and locations and was really a bit out of our reach. We also decided to allocate production roles to each member of the group. Harry Symes and I would be co-directors and co-editors, Carlina Flood would be producer and Keiran Jones would be sound. This meant that each member of the team would have an exact idea of what the part in the production would be and so would know there responsibilities .
Carlina was quite successful at finding actors, she made a shortlist that got whittled down into the final cast, I booked out equipment and Keiran was able to gain permission to film in the Victoria Works. But tragically disaster struck; two days before filming was scheduled to start our lead actor pulled out. This forced us to use Matt, Carlina's Boy Friend and a music student with no previous acting experience. This also meant that we had to change pubs so i arranged for us to film in the Royal Oak.
Filming started on a Thursday and finished the following Friday. Along the way we pretty much had every single problem in the book happen including; sound problems, lighting problems, location problems, props breaking, transportation issues, script issues, running out of day light whilst filming the chase scene, a main character injuring himself etc..
Post production also lasted about a week and was acompanied by our group falling down many pitfalls, the most problamatic of which was the final edit of the film being 4 minutes over the required length. this meant we were forced to cut a third of the film, which made a barely watchable film even more difficult to follow. Any here is the result of our suffering:




This is not a film i am proud of. The only positives I can take away from it are that we attempted to make quite an ambitious film and failed doing it and I feel like I've learnt a lot from the mistakes we made whilst making it. We needed to give ourselves more time to film and edit, also we needed to prepare better in pre-production.

Personal Project Development

I found with my initial idea for my personal project that there was far to many major problems including; Copyright, security and access issues. I have decided to evolve my idea into something a lot more doable but still around the same subject: football fans passion/boarder line obsessions with their clubs. I watched clips such as this:



I thought this would be a nice idea but it'd require a lot of consent and form filling so i decided to something a bit more low key. I had an idea of doing a sports style interview so i looked into some interviews given by football players, in particular experienced footballers who have experience giving this style of interview:





I have taken ideas from both of these styles and decided to create an interview with a fan in the style of the sports press. Basically I'm going to make a fan seem as important as a professional footballer, I want this to reflect their importance to the club's success .