Commentary

For this film I was an actress and an editor; while filming I tried to pay attention to continuity errors and try to limit them as much as possible. This was hard to do since we were more worried about the cinematography and story line than the little details. Problems that occurred in my area of responsibility were not having a lot of takes of one scene, not being able to limit more continuity errors and not being able to convey the storyline better. To make up for the problems that occurred while filming I tried to limit the amount of continuity errors in my edit and show the best shots of footage we had. I also put a voice over in the opening scene to try to convey the story better. Problems that occurred in the film as a whole were we could not convey our storyline with the number of scenes we had and there were many continuity errors. Our group did not try to solve the problems that occurred while we were filming and only focused on the cinematography. A group member wanted to leave our 5th scene out of the movie because he did not think it was necessary and was just focusing on the shots rather than the actual film. A problem we had as a group was time; there was limited time we all could shoot at. My group also was not worried about the continuity errors and did not listen to me when I would point out a continuity error. Also a group member only got one good take of each scene so we did not have much to work on in the edit. Things we could avoid with future films are limiting the number of continuity errors, get more than one good take of each scene and focus more on the storyline than the shots. Some successes we have in our film are our opening scene and the amount of coverage. Our group had a lot of different angles and shots. We tried to incorporate many different shot techniques in our film “Skin Deep”.

1.Genre Connections
We wanted to have the same genre of the film “Amelie” which is romantic comedy. We wanted to incorporate the type of relationship that Amelie and Nino had. It was not conveyed through our film because of the lack of storyline. We wanted to portray Amelie’s character to our main character, which was the guy. Our film is about a boy who finds a girl’s wallet and tries to give it back to her but also get her to notice him. When he first realizes that the girl in the library was the girl that lost her wallet he gets distracted. After he puts down his phone he notices she is gone and cannot find her. He then goes home and looks through all his yearbooks trying to find out what her name is. After he finds out her name he was suppose to notice she was on the track team and that was going to be something they had in common, which would make him fall in love with her even more. After that scene it was going to be the tutoring scene which is a coincidence and that is where he gets her to talk to him and he gives back her wallet. This relates back to “Amelie” because Amelie tried to find way for Nino to talk to her and they then fall in love with each other once they meet.

2. Acting/Character
As far as acting goes, I could have acted better in the film; I believe Brandon’s acting was pretty good and believable. We could of done better with acting by taking the filming more serious and trying to make the acting more believable in less takes. We both knew how we wanted the characters to be in the film so it was not difficult to convey how to act in this film. To improve the acting of our actors we can try to be more believable with the tone of our voice and the reaction shots. I think we have good body language throughout the film to portray the character’s feelings.

3. Edit/FX, Techniques or Concepts
I think our shots were done very well. We have a lot of different camera techniques we used throughout our film. I do not think that our shots dragged on too long; they were as long as we needed them to be to convey the message we were trying to send to the audience. Many of our shots did not need much editing besides trimming them and adding some transitions or using match action. I used match action and eye line match a couple of times in my edit.

4. Sound FX
It was a little difficult to find music to match our film. There were a few tracks that matched our film perfectly but they were out played and a lot of people used them in their films for this project. I used a royalty free sound effect of the Internet for the sound of the car since our cinematographer did not use the microphone to get ambient sounds. I also recorded the door opening and closing for the film because the microphone did not pick up on the sound. To make the film more realistic I think we should have had more ambient sounds.

5. Cinematography
The areas I feel like out cinematography could of improved were the continuity errors and making sure our gear is not in the shot. There were a couple of shots were our gear was in the shot which limited the use of that shot. Also I think we could of taken more takes on each scene so we have more footage to work with rather than being limited to the small amount of good footage we have. I think the thing we did well with cinematography was the type of shots we had; we experimented with shots and tried to have coverage with various angles and camera movements.

6. Production Design
Our production design was pretty easy; we filmed at the library, parking lot, conference room and Brandon’s house. It was not difficult to getting access to these locations. We tried to get rid of anything distracting in the background and not have anything stand out that was not important to the film. Something that we could improve was the library scene. We used the librarian in our film and in one shot she was sitting down and then in the next shot she was not in her seat. We could improve the backgrounds of our shots and make sure they are consistent.

7. Your "objective" analysis of the film as a whole
Our film could have been improved a lot just by having that one extra scene to convey our storyline, without it there is no story and makes no sense for how the character tries to get the girl to talk to him. Even with a voice over in the beginning it is hard to try to get the audience to understand our concept. Just by taking one more day to film our movie could have been so much better. With the edit we can try to move things around to try to make the film make more sense but it is very difficult since we are limited with the amount of footage. Overall I believe if we put some more effort into the concept and filming the film could have came out a lot better but since we were limited on filming time and concept ideas it was hard to get our storyline across to our audience. (word count: 1,285)

Rationale

After watching the French film “Amelie”, I wanted to incorporate the style of Magical Realism. By making my film “Skin Deep” I was able to incorporate some of the stylistic devices from “Amelie” such as color correction and the genre of romantic comedy. My plan was to film for 4 days and edit one scene each day; then on the last day of editing make the final touches and edit the sound effects. This project was a good idea because it shows how well students can incorporate different film techniques in their individual films. Also by students having to edit their own films it shows each students strengths and weaknesses as an editor.