Evaluation for After the storm

The film title "After the storm" was interpreted during the film as the storm being the happenings of the day and the girl finding the bag and the aftermath was the murdering of the girl because she knew what was in the bag, she knew too much.

Our initial idea was to take the title literally and show a natural disaster happening and its aftermath. However I think our film worked quite well in showing this.

We first started gathering ideas in a brainstorm then took the best idea and drew up a storyboard for it. The story board showed our two locations; green park and the river just outside of green park. It also showed detailed sketched, angles and shot types and also a little bit of the actual story was explained in it.

We originally decided to recruit people from MAPA at bath college (Preforming art students). But as none were free at the time we were filming, we improvised using Jenni and Tom as actors in the film. I did the camera work myself. The only problem in acting was in one of the last shots where Jenni got hit and fell over and laughed but other than that everyone worked really well.

The location we used worked out very well as the weather in the park and the darkness created by the surrounded trees created a sense of mystery, tension and suspense. Another thing that created suspense was the idea that no one ever finds out whats in the bag that shocks the girl so badly.

I think that some of our other strengths were the amount of different shot types we used such as, close ups, medium shots, long shots, panning, over the shoulder shots and shots of people running during the chase which I think worked really well as it was unique. We tried to make the audience feel as though they we're part of the chase.

Some of the problems we encountered we're in the location as there were lots of dog walkers around who's dogs kept on coming over and getting in the way of some of our shots. We also could have planned to bring props in before hand. We had to improvise by going to get ketchup to use for blood from Sainsburys (which actually worked quite well) and also having to find sticks around the park to use as weapons. Another problem was getting the bag out of the river aswell because we didn't want to litter but we got it out eventually with a long stick.

Some of the things I have learnt whilst filming were to use more time for planning and that communication within the team is really important. It was also my first time using those specific cameras and using the tripod as well which took a while to work out but was fairly easy. If I could change anything in this project i would have given myself more planning time and worked more closely in that time with my group.