‘Obscured from View’ is the title of my short film. My inspiration for it came from walking all the way to the far east of London, beside the river with my best friend. I noticed some unparallel things whilst walking in London and I found it so unique that I wanted to do something to show how much I appreciated living in London. At the time, I was working on this unit, but the idea was in my sub-consciousness and not fully developed. When I was told I could work solo, the short film project arose; I thought I should put the idea I had to work. I also found inspiration in ‘Rubber Johnny’ which we watched in class, because it had my mind ticking as to what it was about and the purpose. Like other short films, my short film isn’t conceived with genre in mind and the visuals individually are abstract, as well as the music. It doesn’t follow a particular structure, nor does it have storylines which are similar to feature-length films.
I didn’t create my short film for an audience, anyone who likes it likes it, but if it were to be marketed and sold off, the primary audience would be adults who live in London to make them appreciate London more, and the secondary audience would be tourists, to exhibit the parts of the city that most of them won’t see. When my short film is finished, I’m going to distribute it online because everyone’s using the internet, therefore, it will get as broad an audience as possible. Websites like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace
I planned the film enough to know what the film was going to be about and how I’d do it, but I didn’t have any idea how I’d link the shots together as they’re so abstract, so when I was working on the storyboard, I knew what shots would go where, but I didn’t know how I’d relate the shots at the end. As for the beginning, I had the opening sequence planned from all along and I knew it’d make a strong opening for ‘Obscured From View’. The planning was a fairly easy stage of production, despite not knowing how I’d link the shots, I knew what I wanted from the film and how I’d do it, so that was a strong basis to start on.
The filming was by far the easiest stage in production. My planning was sufficient enough that I could go out to film, knowing what I wanted. I changed my mind once, whilst filming, because the VOX pops were appalling, due to the lack of thought in the questions and the interviewees. I rewrote the questions to make them more specific towards London, as that is what the film is about, the other questions were too broad and this was reflected in the interviewees’ answers. The weather conditions were terrible, apart from one day, but that didn’t matter for 80% of the time because there were only two shots which required it to be sunny: the opening sequence and the shot of the mirror in Hyde Park.
I needed to reshoot once: for the opening sequence and the VOX pops, but I still haven’t got a satisfactory opening sequence because on the week I rented the camera out, the weather forecast was misleading so on the days it claimed to be cloudy, it was sunny, the day it claimed to be sunny, it was cloudy. Due to poor reliability in the weather forecast, I shot an opening sequence in average weather conditions. Filming was enjoyable compared to planning, because ideas kept on cropping up that I wanted to shoot. It was also enjoyable because I had a chance to explore the city and it felt so liberating as I could enjoy other peoples’ company (I needed someone to hold the boom for me when filming VOX pops).
Editing is equally enjoyable as editing, but the hardest part in comparison with the rest of the stages of production because I know that time is running short, but there’s so many little things that I want to add which I think would look good. I’ve found that I usually get very emotionally attached to the filming and editing stages because I’ve got ideas to work with and I see things shaping up.
For remaining couple of weeks, I need to overlay peoples’ VOX pops over the film, find a couple of clips to link the shots in the short film together, add titles, and find music to put as a soundtrack on the short film.
Working by myself has felt extremely liberating: there’s no-one to restrict my ideas and I enjoy things being entirely made by me because if I like something and I want to add it, I can add it and I feel satisfied as well as excited. However, it has been hard too because I have so many ideas that pop up whilst filming and some of them are entirely irrelevant to the short film that I’m making; there’ve been instances where I’ve felt like forfeiting this idea for another one and working solo, it’s hard to say “no” to myself and it’s hard not to be distracted by other ideas that I think are better. Working solo has taught me that I get distracted and that I’m often unsure of one idea if a ‘better’ one has come to mind, it has also taught me that I can become obsessive over one project, protective and not want to depart from a certain stage of production. It has ascertained my passion for film making. The positives heavily outweigh the negatives: I love working by myself because it’s peaceful, it teaches me about who I am and above all, it’s extremely liberating and rewarding to be able to do what ever I want to the project and be proud of it.
