One Word Film

Student Directions:

             In this project, students were placed in pairs and had a word given to them by the teacher. This word would embody the theme of their project. The film had to be 60-90 seconds long and was not allowed to contain any form of dialogue. 

Summary:

             The word we ended up getting was “Hateful”. The first part of our project was to brainstorm some ideas we had on what our shots wanted to look like. We first decided to plan out our storyline, by writing a very short summary of each cut. After we decided on our main plan, we then added in a bigger description on what techniques and types of shot we wanted to use for each cut. This overall helped us to picture how we wanted to place our camera and the complexity of each desired shot. We were then asked to use some editing techniques to add in to our final project. The techniques we decided to use were the shot, reverse shot and the action match. These two methods helped to create our tone and solidify the exact visualization of how we wanted to create our film.

Our Brainstorming sheet:





Self-Analysis:


            I believe our project incorporated the use of the word “Hateful” quite well. Our use of the characters' facial expressions was used to our advantage as the project required no dialogue. The use of our camera shots in the shot reverse shot sequences were used to help determine a point of view from the other characters perspective. I also think we executed our action match well. The camera placement, angle and cuts helped to provide a larger sense of feeling to the shots, while also preventing any harm to the actor.


            However, our “talking” scene was unnecessary and marginally more difficult because of the lack of dialogue. That scene could have been replaced with something else that delivered the same message. I also believe some of our shots lacked a good sense of meaning, and some could have been edited out or even replaced. We had a short amount of film time to work with, so some scenes could have been edited shorter, however the film time would be under the time minimum. The setting of some of our scenes seems repetitive, we weren't moving the camera in the same amount of movement the character had done. Some scenes were in about the same place as others, even after the character had moved. Some of our shots were executed not to the best of our ability. The over the shoulder shot seemed to be our weakest, as it didn’t fully capture the over the shoulder feeling, it was instead more of a mid-shot. Next time I'd think deeper about how the full story will progress, and not have minor mistakes that could impact the film negatively.


Link to my project: OWF_Miller.mov