The Exchange

Before Christmas we each put into groups and had to practice filming a short opening sequence to a film noir, my group was Jessica, Maya, Suzi and I.

This is our storyboard;

After showing our piece to an audience we received some much valued responses to it. The first was that the storyline was quite hard to follow; no one understood why the woman was following her. Many said that we should have done a shot of some writing on the paper I read; this could have helped the audience understand the narrative and probably would have added more tension.

Another problem we had was continuity throughout the shots; some of the shots didn’t work together properly and does not match. For example there is one shot where Jess is right behind me and i’m looking around nervously and then suddenly I am sitting on a random bench, this does not add up at all and to the audience it made them feel them like it was missing. Another scene which did not work was where in one bit the letter was perfect and in the next it was crumpled up.



We did not get off to the best start as we changed our scripts and had to film twice, the first time we realised the narrative was very weak and the location did not fit. The second time actors did not show up so we had to change the storyboard to fit this.
We evaluated our preliminary work by using the phrase SMART, this stands for
S-Specific
M-Measurable
A-Achievable
R-Realistic
T-Time

I do not think we reached these targets very well as we didn’t really have a specific goal, we changed the storyline three times so on the day of shooting it was extremely confusing. We did not get any of our work in on time, we never met the deadlines. When we first wrote up our idea, it wasn’t achievable, we had too many characters and actors never turned up, the storyline was hard to film and the setting was hard to find and not available to film in. Overall, I think we should have planned a simpler idea and thought much more carefully about the project.

This is our final piece;