Week 6 (Gold)

For week 6 and 7, I served as sound, and co-director. Our theme was social British realism, and this would also be the film we re-shot for week 7 as there was great feedback about it's acting, it's improvised script, and narrative, but we all basically agreed sound quality was poor in places, and shaky camera shots and a few shots out of focus let it down in places. It was a pretty unanimous decision to have Dan and Sophie off script to really try to create, and preserve the realism, which really made it seem natural, and emotional as a story knowing it wasn't heavily constructed, and could easily have happened in real life.  The casual costume, with generally bleak colours, suggesting the lower class, and suiting the atmosphere and tone of the piece was also very intentional. We also figured a kitchen would be the perfect setting, being the ultimate symbol of domesticity, while also suggesting specific gender roles, which are also evident in the piece with Dan not doing his part in their marriage. We didn't use lighting on this shoot, it was generally quite grey, quite bleak, as obviously appropriate to relate to the emotional mood of the film.

While the script was improvised, Dan the screenwriter, and I made sure to talk about things that would relate to the theme, unemployment, looking for jobs, no food, the awkward social situation of being a squatter. We also delve quite bravely into the themes of domestic abuse, and quite possibly into the abuse of children which is kind of suggested while not explicitly shown. In terms of sound, we used no soundtrack or sound effect as we weren't going for heavy elements of construction, but realism. However a few sounds we used to our own effect, where the can of lager Dan opened, as just a visually interesting few seconds we could cut to, and him in the toilet peeing (which was actuality on the audio) which I think really embraced the whole idea of British realism. The sound problems that let this piece down, were mainly down to staging, meaning I couldn't the boom close to speech without it being in the frame of the camera, and was positioned behind the actors most of the time due to the wall meaning I got quite shaky audio. Overall I was happy with the piece, and happy with the feedback even though it had problems, and the idea to use the camera as the eyes of a child in that way, was what really made it quite a special piece in my opinion.