Evaluation of Signs

About signs:

Signs is a romantic short film. It’s also a 12 minute speechless film. We have started filming the short movie for Signs. The two main characters are named Jason and Stacey. The short movie is about a man who works in a company and at first he starts of as a character who keeps to himself and is quite lonely. However, during his time at work he meets a women who works in the company opposite to where he works, and the way he communicates to the women is by writing on paper. Half way through the movie the women is nowhere to be seen and the man starts feeling the way he was at the beginning of the movie. The producer shows this by music; at the beginning the music was slow and quite saddening, however, when he meets the women the music becomes much faster, upbeat and happier, but when the women gets her promotion, the man has no idea and thought that he will never see her again, which then lead to the music becoming slow and sad once again. At the end of the short film both decide to meet each other in the middle of the road between their two companies, they both looked very happy to see each other and then that was the end of the short movie by Patrick Hughes.

For this first assignment my group and I have to recreate 3 minutes of the short movie. We have chosen to film from 4 minute 21 seconds to 7 minutes 21 seconds. My group consists of myself, Twariq and Philip. The film also consists of additional actors that will just be in the background but the film will also consist of a girl that can play the lead role of the women who falls in love with the male actor.

Different shots used:

The short movie also consists of many different shots. For example, the shots that were used was mid shot, wide shot, long shot, over the shoulder shot and close up shot. All these different shots allows the audience to get the full experience of the short movie. This means that because of the multi-camera shots it allows the viewers to actually think that they are there and are involved in the film. By using different camera shots it allows the audience to see the different emotions and expressions that the characters are portraying. This is effective because it allows the audience to see how the characters are feeling at different and specific times of the short movie.


Teamwork:


In this assignment for media I had to work In a group, which had to make me more confident, so that I could give my ideas for the production. I also had to take the leadership role because we needed to set times for when we was going to film and we also needed to set up meetings with teachers, for example, The Head Teacher, so that we could ask for permission to use for his conference room, which our short movie production needed. Since we had only three in our group we needed additional actors and actresses, which had increased the responsibility levels for myself and my group because we had to find out when they were free to film,  and what they needed to do in the scenes. 

Advantages/Strengths:

When my group and I got the assignment to film a short 3 minute film, we got straight on it. The first thing we done was book a meeting with our head teacher so that we could ask him if we could borrow his conference room, so that we can use it to film the part where the man (Jason) is in the conference room playing noughts and crosses with the girl (Stacey). We also had many strengths that came with our group because we had someone good with the camera and editing, and we had good actors/actresses and people that had great ideas, we also had someone that was a good leader (director) who got things done. Since, we are in a school, so we have a lot of space and a variety different areas to film that will suit our needs and will look similar to the actual places in the film.

Disadvantage/Weaknesses:

During, the time when my group and I were filming and editing our short movie, we unfortunately lost a few of our clips and a week before this our Mac computer shut down completely. So, as you can probably tell my group and I were very unlucky during this media assignment. However, luckily the technicians got the mac running, but we could not get the footage that we got back so we had to quickly film the parts we lost again, and with only a little bit of time left to finish this assignment it was quite challenging.