The Writing for Film class exercises have offered both a practical and conceptual insight into film production. So far there has been a strong emphasis getting out there and producing content, from script writing, to filming, to editing. I think this approach is really effective as the best way to learn is from doing. It gives us the chance to experiment, make mistakes and ultimately learn from our experiences along the way.

Class exercises over the past two weeks have enabled us to cover the works as we got the chance to dabble in all stages of production. Through this, we were able to put our creative and technical skills into practice to create something simple yet well structured, continuous and complete.

For exercise 2b, in groups we were asked to draw inspiration from the creative students kids clips to create something of our own. In our group, we decided to write our script as a continuation of the following clip:

With the intent to change the dynamic of the relationship, we decided that the main mobster character would be the father/mother to the two ‘children.’ Although we had limited time to come up with a script, we came up with something short, snappy and easy to shoot. This left a lot of room for improvisation on set, resulting in the dialogue to come across more natural and fluent.

In terms of filming, we were instructed to gather six shots in total. At first I thought that this seemed a lot for a scene with minimal action, but when it came to editing, I realised why the more shots would be useful. In terms of continuity, some shots would work, and others would not. Thus it was valuable to have an array of different shots to choose from and carefully select which of them would work best. Here’s what I came up with in the editing suite (please excuse the painfully awkward ending – we kind of forgot to come up with a conclusion):

In the edit suite, I also learned that changing shots must fulfil purpose. If they are changed erratically, or unnecessarily, they consequently detract from the content of the film and viewer is likely to be aware of the cuts when they should fly unnoticed. More shots or cuts does not necessarily equate to a better quality product. For this reason I chose to neglect a medium close up two shot of the children as it just seemed random and unnecessary, and ultimately disruptive to the flow of the scene.

So far I am really enjoying these classes and am learning a lot from each exercise. With each task come new learning curves that teach us something valuable about the filmmaking process.