– Reflection on collaborative –

To be honest, at the beginning I thought assignment no.5 was going to be an individual task so when I was informed we were working collaboratively, I thought there would be way easier to have someone working with me for sure. Although things did not really turn as what I expected to be, to schedule the shooting days that suit everyone became the first problem we have faced. As I have mentioned in the past reflections I have even shoot by myself sometimes just because the time didn’t match every time.  The studio runs as usual every day, so if we want to film Carina’s close up shots we have to make sure there would not be too much distractions in the area.  Since we do not use all of our spare time just for the film, especially the location we were shooting is changeable all the time. Initially, we have divided jobs for each person: I was the director, Hazel was the editor, and Rebecca was the producer. However, since we need to find the day that suits for the studio, our actress and us, we took so much longer to finish the film.

Moreover, something I have realized and learnt from this project was: I used not to understand that why there were news about film directors disputed with the produce team, and I totally understand their situation and feeling now. I guess every director has their own vision of the film, for every scene and every single shots, let alone this is written from my observation and inner conflict. After the discussion with Robin, I was pretty confident on how I wanted my film to be, although when different person read the same story or just look at an image, they will have different understanding to it. It might vary by the person’s experienced, culture background, religious, interests or knowledge. When everyone gets a chance to manipulate the camera, I have the vision in my head that I believe will work perfectly, but each of us recommended to shot in different angles, so we ends up with lots of footage in one shot but varied angles. We have left all the decisions to happen in the edit suite. Everyone will understand a story-line with their knowledge, experiences and characteristics, so does Rebecca and Hazel. Which I totally understood, just because this is based on my observation, I have a very clear vision of how should the film turn out to be, sometimes I was not confident enough or I felt uncomfortable to deny somebody’s thought. This is something I found the most challenging while collaborating.

Collaboration is sometimes challenging.

– Group film conclusion –

In conclusion for this group film project, I have learnt so many things through our the semester especially by sharing my ideas with Robin and classmates, I really do believe that how the elders always tell us you always can learn a thing from the people around you. One new thing I learnt while progressing the film was the importance of the continuity matters in all the media pieces, this is the most basic way to make it logical. This project is such a wonderful experience to learn from, we didn’t have a clear shot list to follow with at the beginning, even though this is my observation so I have the view of what the film will be like in my mind, its still very easy to get confuse while shooting. If everything happens one more time, I am going to right the shot list first and also get the storyboard ready on the shooting day for sure. The second important factor I have learnt is I finally understand why the dance studio scenes that appears in the movies need to be very carefully set up and manipulate, because if we keep the dance studio as what it is in real life, the situation is sometimes out of your expectation as there are too many variables in this public but limited area.

We were very stuck with choosing a proper title for this film, so each of us came up with three titles to choose from, and we have got a list of titles to choose from, ‘Missing step; last routine; right& left; departure; apart; step up etc.’ but none of them seemed to be very satisfactory. <Out of Step> was the title Robin suggested by summarizing all the titles we had above, and this is the title we ending up to have for this film. I do think this is very relevant to our film as there are lots of shot from different angle and distance to show the main character – Carina’s inner conflict, especially the close up of her walking up and down are all aimed to represent the sense of isolation, loneliness, helpless and giving up finally.