(practice project for main production piece) - 'The Burden'

This project was very interesting, being our first serious project. Miss gave us all the word 'albatross' to base our project on. We were warned not to make the short film predictable, for example, literally involving an albatross in the filming. So we researched the meaning of the word and found that it roughly represented a burden of some sort. This was our starting point.

We were limited to filming in school time, so we found it ideal to involve education at some point. The story is based around the life of one student who is struggling in life, having to try balance his school work with looking after his fatally ill sister (the burden).

When looking at the edited version of the short clip, we could see the story being told quite effectively. But seeing as the project was a learning process, we realised that there was still room for improvement, for example, length of cuts, effective camera angles, lighting. Harriet and I found the roles we took on quite challenging, seeing as the story was sad and gloomy, very much unlike ourselves. But again we realised it was a learning experience and we could only improve from it.

Overall our team worked very well. We presumed that moulding all the different ideas we had together would be difficult, but we proved ourselves wrong. There was no argument while filming and few disagreements to new propositions, which made the whole process run a lot smoother.

Highlights of the film:

• Point of view shot- this was filmed down the school corridor in the middle block. In this clip many students walked down the corridor, it being the end of a lesson. in the shot you could see a hand reach out occasionally as the character pushes past people. We thought having a jittery camera view as well as the pronounced heart beat for audio added uneasiness to the clip. 

•  The shot of the girl laying sick in the bed as the boy sits at the end added to the meaning of the film. The girl is shown to be of less focus in the scene, which actually tells you what situation he's in. You can see the boy more defined and visible compared to the shaded character who sits further back in the shot. This signifies his potential to achieve greatly in his school work, but there is still something that deters him, lingering in the background.