We completely changed our direction into a short film, (which is what we wanted to do in the beginning I might add). The only trouble was coming up with a witty story that was both artistic and relevant to the topic of networks. Coming up with ideas proved to be our downfall. It seemed that everyone was on a different page as to what they wanted to create. I had a firm vision for what the film should be like but I felt that influences from other people in the group lead me astray and away from my vision.
I found that our workflow was extremely poor. We literally could not stay on task for more than 20 minutes without going completely off topic. I put this down to the fact that we all got along together TOO well. There wasn't really anyone in the group who made a stand and put pressure on everyone to get work done. We had discussed concepts for half a semester and researched many aspects of the money network however I think this was our main problem. The money network was so vast that our minds were scattered with thoughts and ideas that formed a jigsaw puzzle that did not fit together. However this greatly influenced the second half of the semester because we recycled many ideas that helped develop the final film. For example. We experimented with me sitting on the side of the footpath on queen street pretending to be a homeless man for 10 minutes while people walked passed. I felt embarrassed and ashamed, feelings that I haven't felt in a long time. This influenced the tunnel scene in the film for example where people are judging the drug addict. It made me truly aware of the opinions that people have other other people both positive or negative. It gave me a new perspective to live a different life influenced by money.
Every single time we would meet as a group we would leave at the end of the day agreeing on a certain idea but then the next day people would change it. And others would forget completely what we were talking about not having documented it in their workbooks. Eventually we decided to start from scratch to make sure we were all on the same page. I made a a list of every single emotion that I could relate to money such as hatred, love, jealously etc. From there we started piecing together certain events that could link together. After researching a few short films and examining their contents we eventually decided to go along with a cyclic style of short film. Where as the money would start at one point and eventually make its way back to its origin. By doing this it really showed the network within money.
However the filming was not very smooth at the beginning. We ran into many problems. The reason being is because we had not fully developed the story and were shooting the beginning of the film without knowing where the scenes were leading. This meant that most of the footage we shot (although very nicely done) was useless and was discarded. However this stage of development was not all a great loss. we discovered that we all were terrible actors. And because our film was aiming to highlight the emotions that people feel because of money, this was not ideal. Not only that but we needed actors for our film and we were not sure if we could find anyone this late in the semester to help us film. Because of these factors we decided that it would be the best option to shoot in first person for most of the film. It also allows the viewers to put themselves in the shoes of the actors and feel what they feel in their situations.
Ideally we would have wanted to use a wide angle lense on the camera but none of us wanted to spend 250$ on a lens. After looking at a few home-made fps 'Call of Duty videos' we decided to build a rig using a helmet so that we could mount the camera on it. After drilling a few holes and lathering a bolt in epoxy glue we finally finished our masterpiece. However we soon realised that we created a few problems for ourselves.
1) You could barely see where you were going while wearing it.
2) Without a wide angle lens it was almost impossible to see your body and arms when looking downwards, you had to physically move your hand in front of the camera to see anything. This made picking up objects extremely difficult.
3) Footage was also fairly shaky, but at the same time this shakiness gave a the film a 'feel' to it that you were looking through the eyes of the character.
All of the filming itself was shot over about a week and a half. Prior to this we travelled around to different locations to confirm what would be appropriate. But with all honesty it was not a very well orchestrated method of planning. I was loosing hope in the project looking at the footage we were accumulating. I felt as though we were extremely rushed in shooting. For example, in the dairy scene that I organised we could only shoot a few shoots because the shop owner did not want us in the shop for too long. This meant that re shooting the bad shots was out of the question. However we had a plan to overcome this during the editing by using the 'blink' transition effect to cut out the bad features of the film. During this time period Supa was filming and directing majority of the shots as he had experience with camera work in the past. However we all played a vital role in this stage of the project as we all gave input as to how things could be improved.
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