1.4 Review own technical skills and use of equipment

I was the director and writer of our film. As the writer I tried to motivate the group when brainstorming ideas for a story, then chose the one that I believed would be most successful. Once I had the approval of everyone else in the group that they liked the idea for the plot, I wrote the script in celtx. This was a really good experience and something I hadn’t expected to do then I applied for BFI Academy as I was expecting to be an editor or cinematographer.

I agree with the feedback, communication was so important in the making of our film and at some times was challenging as two of our team members weren’t strong English speakers, despite this we all got along really well and worked amazingly efficiently on shoot day, so although sometimes communication between members was a struggle, we overcame the challenge and had loads of fun.

One of the things I really struggled with was adapting to the idea of being a writer/director, I was originally supposed to be the editor and it was slightly later on when we were planning ideas for the story-line that we decided some of us should switch our roles around as some people would be better suited to different roles.

I learnt LOADS about editing as our editor was unwell on the edit day so we had to edit the film as a team, which was at times very stressful but also quite fun. I learnt about the importance of a white balance as we forgot to do one in one of our scenes and the shot has a slightly blue tone, but this means I’ll definitely remember from now on.

My understanding of film development has increased massively. As the writer/director I had to complete all the shot lists as well as put the story into script format. We all also had a talk with a producer at the start of the course that really put tings in perspective about all the documents that must be completed in order to process a film, e.g. copyright, the writes to the film, risk assessments, permission to film in public places etc.