Hollow - film evaluation

Hollow – Evaluation

The strongest part of the whole production process was the pre-production planning. The other script writer and I had excellent communication when it came to the script writing, and so I felt it was a strong and well-structured script, which only needed minor tweaks when it came to presenting it to the rest of the group. As well as that, the other pre-production planning was effective. For example, our shot list was complete, risk assessment and our equipment were prepared, although the equipment itself is the only thing I would hope to have had better quality (although this is merely down to funding). Perhaps in the future, with better funding we can have more to work with, but I think that we did well with what we had. We were all quite comfortable in our roles and worked well in our roles, although we also had room to explore and experiment with other roles we had taken interest in. Therefore, I feel that in the future, everyone else can benefit even more with experimenting further with other roles, to get the best out of this course and experience.

To improve, I feel like there could have been better communication with the other crew members; there was a lot of tension between a few of the members of the group, which caused a bit of a hindrance and was mentally draining for everyone else. Therefore, in future, I hope that now the members are more acquainted and comfortable with each other, we can work better together and with more chemistry. As well as that, we could’ve done better if we had a single director, as instead, everyone kind of directed themselves, which caused some confusion among the other members. This is purely due to role assignment, however, and can be fixed easily in future. In addition, there was an instance where one of the actors refused to act out a scene us script writers had scripted for them to do, which meant that we then had to spend even more time to rewrite the entire scene. I feel as though this could be resolved easily if that actor had become better accustomed to their role and character and knew exactly what was expected of them. Lastly, personally, I felt as though we had rushed through the filming process too quickly. Many of the members of the group wanted to finish it in one day, whereas myself and another member suggested that we should spread it over the course of a couple days to gain a better perspective of things (this was mainly for mine and her sake however, as scenes were having to be altered completely due to other hindrances).

To conclude, in future, I believe that we can do better through more effective planning and role assignment, as everyone took over a completely different role when it came down to filming. Moreover, a personal goal for myself in post-production is better audio editing, as I had also rushed through it quite a bit – I need to edit the audio after the film is edited without audio first, so I can customise the audio to best fit the film. Now we are also more comfortable together and have gained an insight into each other’s’ personalities, I feel that we will work better together when it comes to making the next film – we are comfortable in the roles we begun with and so will do much better overall. We should treat this as a learning curve rather than a failure, as it came out better than many of us had expected, with regards to what we had in terms of funding, resources, members and time.

For future reference:
·         Ensure that roles are assigned which best fit and that everyone is comfortable in their assigned role
·         Ensure that planning is finalised rather than being made up as we go along
·         Ensure deadlines are set to avoid confusion
·         Ensure that everyone is in the right mindset to film – don’t rush as this will only cause more stress
·         Perhaps consider having more members behind the scenes rather than in front of the camera
·         Ensure all members have something to be doing at all times to encourage an efficient and motivated mindset