The Necklace

My Evaluation on The Necklace Our task was to create a 90 second short film to be entered in the depict website. In our group there were 4 of us. We came up with an idea that a girl finds a necklace planted in her bag. From this necklace she finds it holds a weird and strange things happen to her. My roles in this were to film the video but also do some editing on Adobe Premiere Po CC 2014 and worked on the story board. I feel that my roles were great but there were some problems in the group that I worked with and that is no one really put any effort into the task we had. But most of the time we worked well as a group and finally finished in the time frame we had. I feel that in my group we had a good interesting story line/plot as it works very well and also was a great idea as it’s not like anything I’ve seen before. However, in my group I was not happy with some of the shots in the filming as they do not flow the way they should, there are jumps from scene to scene. To improve this, we could have faded scenes in or put a text on the screen saying, for example, ‘Five minutes later…’ But also there were some continuity errors: the main character wore mostly the same outfit but in the last 2 shots she was wearing something different. To make sure this doesn’t happen again, the actor could have made a note of what she was wearing on Day 1 (e.g. photo on phone). In our group there were some big issues which were people not turning up to the class, planning and making decisions together and not having the props needed. This meant we had to keep redoing things and the filming took 4 lessons instead of 2 lessons. This meant we were then behind with follow-up work. We also had technical difficulties with the camera and computer but also the uploading of the video. On the other hand, the main actor played her role well because she took the assignment seriously and focused on getting the task completed in time. Also, the camera was positioned effectively for most of the shots. We tried several options to make sure it was put in the right place and because of this I feel it worked very well and the short film couldn’t have gone any better. In our short film we had a range of props which made the story more understandable and fun to watch and due to this I am extremely happy with how the short film has turned out.

The Necklace

Low budget film making

I have recently watched The Blair Witch Project which had a very low budget to film with which could be seen by the lack of props and actors. The only props they had were a tent, sleeping bags, map, compass and one car. They didn’t even have any food.

In the Blair Witch Project, they didn’t have any lighting and when they did have lighting it was just the natural lighting from the day light as most of the film was shot in the open, outside and during the day. In the night scenes the screen was an unnatural green but if they had a bigger budget for lighting they could have developed the night scenes which would have made it more realistic: you didn’t see any clue to what had happened. How they dealt with this was that the incident was suggested by a scream and the actors running from something.

They did not have enough money to hire real actors they had to play themselves in the film. Also they didn’t have other extra characters because they didn’t have anyone to act them. They did not need to pay for costumes as they just wore ordinary clothes. Also they did the filming themselves. They didn’t need a scriptwriter as they improvised their lines.

Also the cameras they had used were not too good: very old, hand held and had no special features. This was because of the lack of money or funds they had to film with.

In The Blair Witch Project, they shot most of the film in one place, which was in the middle of the woods in a tent and walking around in the wood very close to where they set up camp for the film. They couldn’t afford expensive locations. There wasn’t a soundtrack either.

The publicity, usually an extreme expense, was via viral marketing.

This all could have been why it was presented in a documentary style because in real life you would not have special equipment or lighting. This actually made it more frightening because it was ‘really happening’. Also, the characters were young adults like the audience so the audience could imagine they were there or it could happen to them and their friends.

 In parts it made you jump because as there was no music it was so quiet and this made you jumpy. There was no fast or tense music to let you know when bad things were about to happen.