Making a short 1 minute film

For my first A2 Media project I had to make a short one minute clip about ' A day in the life of...' and chose what to make the clip about. This could have been anything at all, a person, a place or even an animal.

After a lot of thinking and heavy discussion  a final conclusion was made, to make a clip about me. The title of the video was called 'A day in the life of Avi'.

I thought that this would make a good one minute film because:

- I could re-film any scenes that I was not completely satisfied with easily, without any complications.
 This is more effective than filming an animal or a place, because I could not guarantee that I can film the exact same scenes again

- People seem to find my views on life and daily activities entertaining

- Eliminates the need to make a booked/slot time to film as this can be done in free time

I created a storyboard which clearly identified all the various scenes that were going to be included in my 1 minute film as well as the camera angles that were going to be manipulated. These included:

• Start of the day (waking up)                                      
• Daily activities
• Direct comparisons of reality and fantasy  

• Close ups 
• Panning shots 
• Worms eye shots 
• Various zooms 
• HA (high angle shots)

Editing was a challenge because final cut pro was not so simple to use. The software was not only demanding but it was not fast at loading which I feel was my greatest complication as this made quick tasks become very time consuming. However after learning all of the various effects and understanding the software, it was definitely something that I am happy that I experienced and I now feel comfortable editing on this software in the future. I used the camera angles that I not only felt were appropriate for the context of the short film but also what I felt was achievable from a regular camera.

Next, I had to think about the sound that I was going to use. Unfortunately the original sound that I had prepared for the short film prior to uploading onto final cut pro did not transfer to the standard that I would have hoped which made the quality of the sound lower than I had wanted. So, in order to overcome this issue, I redownloaded the song 'FLAWLESS' by Beyonce on a mobile phone using the software 'imovie'  and placed the music on top of the footage in order to overcome my problem. 

For the main plot of the clip I thought that it would be best to have two key elements to base the short film on, a fantasy and a reality. In this case, it was my ideal perception of life vs. reality.

As I was working in a group, there were a few minor issues that we had to overcome.
1.) Finding time outside of our media lesson so that we could film the footage for the short film and edit it effectively.
2.) Equipment errors - We faced an issue at the start of the filming process, as the camera that myself and my group and filmed on was not compatible with the new Apple Mac software that we needed to edit the footage on. Therefore we lost the original scenes that we had filmed and lost some editing time, to meet the deadline. Luckily, our first scenes were filmed right away and we noticed the issue in time. Therefore we were able to re-film some scenes and were able to raise them to a better standard than we had hoped, which was a positive outcome from this camera error.