Evaluation & Reflection

10th March - 14th March

This week, I presented my Pecha Kucha to the class, alongside a few Game students. I was the first one up and I could say the Pecha Kucha went mostly around the same as the last one, though I tried to have more charisma than last one, which I guess went a little weird for some.

17th March - 21st March

This was the week I fully started filming for my FMP, starting with filling out things like the Call Sheet, Risk Assessment, Shot List and Location Recce throughout the week, and finally starting filming the first section for my FMP on Friday. The filming went smooth with no issues and was finished in around an hour, which went a lot quicker than I imagined it going.

Another thing that happened this week was Thomas started filming for his FMP, which we filmed scenes of me reading a book, alongside filming a fight scene with Dennis, though only using finger guns and no fists. He intends to continue filming for the next few days.

24th March - 28th March

Coming back, we finished the remainder of the film, with Thomas playing a character that reminds my character about the book was there the whole time. We filmed the scene in one take due to it being very close to the end of the day, so we really winged it in the end.

21st April - 25th April

After the Easter Holiday, I haven't had time to film the second section of the FMP, though I'm looking to schedule a time that doesn't clash with Thomas' FMP. Speaking of that, we filmed some miscellaneous shots of me panicking and trying to find the book, and alongside that, we have started choreography on a fight scene inside the studio, where I'm up against 5 people.

28th April - 2nd May

Next week ahead, and I have less than a month to reach the deadline, and yet no date has been set currently, although I intend to maybe start on Thursday, that way, next week, I finally finish everything and can write an evaluation. Also this week, we did more choreography, this time with more people to give it the feel of a 5 man, and I showed some pretty impressive moves. Thomas did tell me that he intends to cut it down to a 3 man fight, but we'll see in the final product.

5th May - 9th May

First off, I finally concluded filming for my FMP after a month long delay, and I have started editing the film, which will be ready by next week. Another thing that happened this week was Thomas had finished his FMP with me in it, and I can say while the ending I talked about wasn't included, it was pretty good for what it was, although I would've preferred if the fight scenes were sped up a bit to make it a little more natural, but otherwise, a pretty decent final product.

12th May - 16th May

A week until the deadline, and I have completed editing for the FMP and is ready to be released. All that needs to be done is to make some posters for the project, and then I am fully complete. I will do the posters over the weekend and the final week will spent on the evaluation.

19th May - 23rd May

Final week until half term, and I can confidently say that I am complete with everything related to the FMP. I also took the time to show the video to some of my friends, who liked what they saw. One interesting thing that came out of it was Thomas' liking to how I portrayed physical media as a dying format without explicitly mentioning streaming, reasoning that the audience would be aware of this beforehand, which was an interesting point that I didn't even think about when making the video.

Final Evaluation

The main idea for the film came from my love of physical media, and how I was told that in the second year, I could make my FMP based off of anything to my liking, compared to last time where we had a specific topic to base our FMP around (identity). I had a lot of different ideas on what I wanted to do for the video, with one of them being a fight between DVD and other formats like VHS, HD-DVD, Blu-ray, 4K etc. with the message alluding to how despite how outdated DVD is, it is still the top format for consumers compared to the other formats.

I had this idea for some time, mostly from when we were finishing up for the winter holidays, but out of the blue, I came up with the concept that would eventually transpire into the final product you see, about a DVD who narrates about his life and how he feels knowing his format is a dying breed. I initially wanted it to just be all narration with shots of the DVD walking around, occasionally seeing a different format and narrating his feelings about that format, such as the first Blu-ray's feeling bitter about not overtaking DVD's, and the 4K's just being known as people who exist. Usually in my free time, I occasionally look at my shelf and stare at the titles, which then gave me the idea to incorporate the shelf sections to the FMP, shown in a Wes Anderson-like setting, with 4 items opposite each other.

Research was a huge player for how the video turned out, I used sites like Blu-ray.com, Amazon UK, and others to find out specific titles on when they were released in order to make the setting as accurate as possible. For example, the HD-DVD says in one line "I was on the shelf for one minute, then the next minute, POOF, Gone." To some, that seems like a dumb throwaway line, but for me, it's a line that hits harder once you know what title is present, because Atonement was actually one of the last HD-DVD's released for the format, being released on February 2008, next year month before HD-DVD was discontinued.

As for primary and secondary research I conducted, I used surveys to determine what audiences think about physical media nowadays and did research around the internet to get an accurate timeline of events. For my survey, a lot of people preferred streaming over physical media, which didn't come as too much of a surprise to someone like me, but nevertheless, the perception of physical media as a dying form was somewhat incorporated into the FMP, though streaming is never directly name-dropped in the final product.

The audience I had in mind for the FMP were not only people who were physical media collectors, but also for general audiences intrigued by the direction of the video. When I made the decision to have it solely focused on DVD's and have almost no human characters, I realised the potential to get experimentally creative with the look of the video, with one of the most obvious one being the shelf portion of the video being in 4:3 and the editing switching from fades to black fades then to just basic cutting. The artistic reason as to why the shelf portion is in 4:3 was to give it the feel as if you were watching the DVD's life through an actual DVD, and as for the black fades, it's meant to signify the DVD's decline in perception of time, as the normal fades happen between 2000-2007, described by him as the best time of the life, and post that, the black fades start happening until it just devolves to generic cuts, which is meant to signify the DVD's decline in perception of time.

More on the topic of artistic integrity, the video also acts like some form of social commentary on physical media and where it's currently at, not only with the whole video being about a DVD's life, but also how it could parallel into real life, with examples like young musicians, entertainers, showgirls etc. on how they are considered the top person in their prime, and then they get slowly phased out before ultimately getting thrown away without any form of appreciation. The second section expands upon this by the VHS, DVD, and HD-DVD having a regular conversation about the DVD's feelings of abandonment, alongside the future for formats like them, with a somewhat happy ending of them acknowledging that even if things get murky, they still have each other in the end.

One detail that I was adamant on doing for my project was to not use stop-motion for the scenes where the VHS, DVD, and HD-DVD are talking to one another, instead, I wanted to portray them by having them move around with an off-screen performer to make it a little more natural. The reason I didn't include stop-motion was because of how impossible it was to achieve what I wanted to do for the project, so I did what I did and shot the video using the technique I had always wanted to do.

The result presented a lot of problems however, with issues like the the titles being too far away or too close to the camera, and the placement causing issues like hands to accidentally get into the frame or the movement being too bombastic or stilted. There was a lot of issues that were mostly my fault, with the obvious one to me being that I shot the scene without any form of proper planning, as while I knew what to shoot, I didn't properly let the actors know what they got into, which lead to the whole shoot feeling like I was making up things on the spot just to reach the end. 

In conclusion, while my ideas did change overtime and strayed far away from my original intention, I honestly think the final product turned out pretty decent, obviously nowhere near from where I intended it to be, but sufficient enough in replicating my original vision. Part of the reason why I believe this is because when I was editing the second section, I managed to fix most of the issues present from filming, which really showed me how much editing can save a product. An example of how editing saved the video was the close-up shots of the HD-DVD of him being far away compared to the others, I didn't fix the shot initially, but when Anette saw it and told me about it, that was when I zoomed it in and colour-graded it to match the other previous shots (the original had too much of a blue tint).

For what I would've improved with it, I would've definitely planned more filming the second section that what happened, like showing the actors the voice recordings beforehand so that they can try replicating it as best as they can, alongside properly planning the placement so that they don't appear too close to one another. Despite those issues, I still stand by the decision to not include stop motion, as it probably would've been more frustrating to do with the way I made the items move around.