Evaluation (Silence)

For our second film, Silence, we are overall pleased with the way it turned out. We believe, being more experienced from the last film we produced, that this one turned out to be more effective and look more appealing, as well as making more sense than the other.

Our story carried over from the script accurately, with there only being a few shots and scenes we altered. Our collection of different shots contained a variety of different angles and lengths each with suitable timing, making them individual and interesting as well as allowing them to tell the story appropriately.

Although the shots went as planned, the editing could’ve been improved on our part as we feel the shots weren’t filmed as smoothly as anticipated, nor were our transitions edited as smoothly between them. Had our editing skills been more refined, we may have been able to fix the issue, due to it being a problem of a lack of experience by using premiere pro more and working on creating a filming schedule so we could have more time to edit our piece.

Our mise-en-scene such as clothing conveyed our issues and themes for example, the white dress used in the final shots conveyed the deceased state of our main character, along with connoting innocence and purity, illustrating to the audience she is an angel. Plants were also a recurring motif throughout our film. Our idea behind this was to include themes of nature and nurture, showing the correlations between the two and how your actions can impact those around you.

Despite this our planning could’ve been done better as some of our shots look as if they were done mainly as filler, this meant our film didn’t have as much as a straightforward narrative as we wanted. To fix this we should have done a time line for our film, so we know how to follow the narrative, we also could’ve used several shot planning sheets, so we could have a better idea on what to film, and so we didn’t waste time.

As well as this our settings also could’ve been better and linked more with the mise-en-scene for example if she was sad it could’ve been raining to connote that. To improve on this, we could have travelled more to different locations and chose more fitting scenery, therefore our shots and narrative of the film would have made more sense.

Another problem we had with mise-en-scene was with our audio. Originally, we were going to use a low whistling noise in the background to imply that throughout the entire film she is dead and so therefore can’t hear anything but deafening silence, this would also imply how she is deaf and so she couldn’t hear anything in life either. However, our original sound clip didn’t work and so we had to change it at the last minute. Despite this, we do believe that our sound still turned out okay as we could still use white noise to imply this, but we don’t think it would’ve worked as well as our original.

Overall, we believe this was a successful second attempt at film-making and was very expressive and aesthetically pleasing.