Kiora

This is a link to a short film from New Zealand that a friend passed on to me thinking it was Australian. If you have got a spare ten minutes check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRlidY7XVlo

Post

Post production is gruelling. When you are editing you see all of the shots you should have got, you watch all of the bad performances that you did not notice on the day and you find little mistakes everywhere. The painful part is that you don’t see all of this just once. You watch it over and over again until you want to scream, then you take a break and then start watching it over and over again. Our writing teacher, Michael Showalter, says you can rewrite your movie in the cutting room and you often have to. You cut shots together in a way that you would have never dreamt of during production.

During our post production period we reviewed each others films in class a number of times. It was very helpful. The first time I showed “First Kiss” one of my classmates said she did not understand the motivations of the Ashley character. She thought Ashley wanted to buy a kiss from Jessica because she had a crush on her. I have done all I can to clarify this in my film. However, a film about teenager girls discovering their homosexuality may be more interesting than the movie I initially set out to make.

Our teachers also gave us advice and guidance. Often they told us things that we were already painfully aware of, like missing shots and faulty performances. But it was good to have those messages reinforced. I learnt so much from the mistakes I made on this project. I realise now that I did not give the actors enough direction so their intentions are at times unclear, I did not get the shots I needed to establish the personality of the central character, I did not get passing of time shots so the transitions in the film are clunky and I did not get enough coverage, especially close-ups. Also, the shot of Ashley looking at the other kids laughing at Jessica looks like it’s from another movie. There is nothing to tie the shot to the rest of the film.

I hope to correct these mistakes in my next film!

Crew 5

After “First Kiss”, I worked on four of my classmates films. My group was awesome and I think we produced some of the best MOS films of our year! It sucked to be the first person out of the crew to shoot. Would I choose to go first again? Definitely not! But the upshot was that I was able to focus completely on everyone else’s films and I wasn’t constantly thinking about the pre-production of “First Kiss”. The shoots were intense and as the length of the days became shorter our call times became earlier and earlier. Four and five am starts became the norm and I got used to putting on as many clothes as possible in order to face the cold weather.



The toughest jobs were Assistant Cameraperson and Director of Photography. There are a myriad of ways in which you can destroy a Director’s movie when you are filling these roles. Easy mistakes like reading the light incorrectly, scratching the film or screwing up the focus can cost you valuable shots and potentially the whole film. All the time, money and effort that has been put into preproduction is wasted if you haven’t successfully captured what is in front of you. Jarreau put it best when he said ‘When I’m loading the film, I feel like I have a nuclear bomb in the changing bag.’ We were all equally inexperienced and we all made mistakes but luckily we were all still able to put together some great films. Yay!