Experimental Short Film Evaluation

MIND GAMES is an interesting experimental short film as it divides 3 mental illnesses into 3 minutes. The first scene consists of a man standing in an underpass and having clones of himself jump into his body. The second scene consists of a girl sitting in a kitchen playing with her food. Finally the third shot consists of a man standing in a bridge, changing his facial expression via jump cuts. These scenes are shot well in terms of the composition and colour grading. In contrast, the quality of the footage is blurry at times due to stretching the footage for framing and contains a lot of noise. Also the footage overall is jump running at 15 fps and decreases the flow of the slow-motion, Although the SFX work really well in blending several sections of footage together to create one seamless shot.

I personally worked on editing the video footage and the SFX; I also contributed to 50% of the idea building and research for this project. First we decided to use mental illness for our products' subject, and then we used the website www.mind.org.uk/ to research three mental illnesses (Schizophrenia, Bulimia and Bipolar Disorder). We then discussed what we wanted to happen in each scene. Originally we wanted to do a shot where we have the actor cloned several times shouting at himself in a chair, but we quickly discarded that idea due to the need of a green screen. We instead chose to have clones jump into the actors body, which was very difficult via the technique of masking and Rotoscoping. This technique was the same in the next scene, although the final scene was easy with just jump cuts. Overall the final film was not far off from our original idea after overcoming the green screen issue.

I have learnt from this project to think outside the box and explore ideas as sometimes being adventurous can pay off. We experimented with the technique called Rotoscoping, which involves masking round a section of footage and blending it into separate footage to make one overlaid image. This technique is similar to green screen technique but involved tweaking the mask frame by frame.

I have also learnt to take more of a back seat when working on a project, as I tend to take control of the project and do everything myself. Working with Carly and breaking down the work equally has stopped a lot of the usual stress I encounter when working on a project. Although I still tend to have strong opinion on how things should be done, I feel I am able to trust my colleagues to do well which allow me to focus on my section of the work.

In the terms of team work, I and Carly worked extremely well together by delegating the work 50:50. We divided the work based on the strength, skills and fair equal work load. I personally worked on the post-production video editing and SFX and Carly took control of the filming. We both recorded the audio and Carly edited the recordings together to create the audio piece. We both came up with the idea to use mental illness as the subject of our film and we chose an illness each to research and morphed our findings together for our research.

Click here for the document form of this evaluation.