Year 2 Short Film Screenings and Feedback

Yesterday we had our short film screenings and feedback sessions.

I found the films a little bit disappointing on the whole – our skills just haven’t advanced as far as I thought they had.

Seeing my own film up on the big screen was disappointing as well. I felt that we could have done a much better job on the colour correction, one scene in particular could definitely have been shorter, and in another, the radio sounded as though it was next to the camera rather than in the scene.

The feedback was quite intense in many ways. I had suggested to the tutors that we should reverse the order of the feedback given so that the director would speak last and I think this was a success. They invited Sophia to speak first and I don’t think that she would have said the things that she said if I had spoken beforehand. I was a little bit annoyed but not necessarily surprised that she said she felt she hadn’t had enough input into the shots and didn’t understand my vision properly. The example she gave though was a bit foolish – she said that when it came to shooting the shot that I was going to use for the title she wasn’t aware of this, however I had noted that this would be the title shot on the storyboards and all four drafts of the shot list! The other students mostly had good things to say about both me and the production, although Jonas felt that he could have done better with the colour correction. I thought RJ’s comments were interesting because he was quite self-critical (which I believe people should be in these sessions) and because he saw the same problem that I did in that we needed to have a more formal, more structured way of working – he said there was a point that we needed to stop being friends and start being professionals.

The tutors feedback was very interesting too, because there were so many differing and strong opinions. Some tutors felt that the acting was excellent and the pacing was good and that I had found the nuances of the story very well and treated it with great sensitivity. Other tutors felt that the music choices were very bad, some of the camera choices were dull or inappropriate, and that the film was too long and the weighting of the scenes was all wrong! I was glad that they had such strong opinions about whether they liked it or not – it showed that they took it a bit seriously as a film, rather than just treating it like a student project and therefore not much was to be expected of it.

Sophia and I had a discussion after the feedback session to talk about where we thought we went wrong. She had thought that she didn’t have enough input, whereas I had felt that she didn’t offer enough or take enough initiative. I think the problem was that our personalities were incompatible. I am very much set to rapid fire when I work, so even though I make it clear that shot lists etc are flexible, perhaps in Sophia’s mind they weren’t, because I didn’t really wait for her input. I just charge ahead and expect her to interrupt me or disagree or speak up when she has an idea. On the other hand I think she expects me to stop and wait for her to have an idea. Anyway, we will know these things about each other when or if we work together in the future.