Single Drama Evaluation

Single Drama Evaluation

For my single camera drama I made a short drama about a girl leaving with schizophrenia which is a long term illness that many people suffer with. I wanted my short film to be dramatic as well as educational. The plot of this film was originally suppose to be two roommates called Afiyah and Serena.  They are moving into a new house because of previous events that had happened in their old house so every time Serena  mentions about the old house Afiyah starts to cut her off. Serena goes for a walk and some 'unknown people' start chasing her. Eventually she ends up tripping up onto the floor and these people are now in front of her. Serena has a flashback of all the time she thought is was speaking to Afiyah when in reality she was talking to her self. She comes back from the flashback and she sees  a figure like Afiyah above her and Afiyah demands the necklace that she has on her and then disappears.

This was a solo project. So I did the directing, camera operating and also the editing of this movie. When shooting this video, I already had problems because most of my actors had dropped out last minute so I had to replace one of my main actors with my little sister and because my little sister is under the age of 13, I had to change the characters from roommates to sister as it would have made more sense to do so. Before I even started shooting I planned the different shots I wanted to have because I wanted to it to vary to make it visually interesting. The first shoot was a panning from the sky to my two main character walking towards their two main character walking towards their 'new house'. Then we get a close up of their face so we can see their face expressions and see what they are talking about. One of my favourite shots is when Serena was waving at this mysterious boy and when Afiyah comes and asks her who she was she waving at, she points at the 'mysterious guy' and it cuts back and the boy was gone. I got a close up of her face reactions then it cuts back to where the boy was standing and then it cuts back to her face again and her walking off. Another shot I liked is when we see get a wide shot of the bystander walking and we see her confused then I did a eyeline match shot of Serena running and looking panicking and no body seems to be chasing her.

The editing process was a little bit new to me because even though I had use after effects before I didn't really experiment with the different types of effects I could do on this software. The single camera drama was a chance for me do to this. I added a ambient soundtracks to my work because when I cut some of the clip the background sound didn't match up so I added the soundtrack so you couldn't notice when I did the cutting. There is a scene where Afiyah is about to lay onto the bed and because I film this scene twice, Afiyah was sitting is a slightly different position so when I edited it, the laying down bit didn't look natural. Also I added special effects to the bits where it was Serena point of view looking at the people chasing her, I used the motion blur to make it look like Serena had a distorted vision because one of the symptoms that you could have in schizophrenia is that you have a distorted visions. I had some trouble because the sound stop playing in my film on after effects. Another problem that I had is when I recorded some of my scenes inside my house it looked really dark and when I tried to edit it the quality of the clip was really bad and the clip became grainy so I decided to re shoot them scenes again to make it clearer. 

When doing this single camera drama I had a lot of different challenges that I had to go through and because this was a solo projects I had to do everything myself. The end result wasn't how I imagine it was going to be but for my first solo 5 minute drama I thought this was a quite a success. If I was to do this next time I would probably get reliable actors, I would also make sure I watch the clips before I finish recording so I know which bits I need to re record. When I showed my peers this film they said they like the concept and the actors where good but when editing I need to make sure that everything flows.