Unit 3 - M4 - How the film has met the client brief

The client brief stated that we had to produce:
     - Short narrative film suitable to be entered for the Independent Directions Film Festival
     - Film can be no longer than 15 minutes long including credits
     - Must conform to a recognisable genre
     - Must make in groups with a maximum of three people
     - Specific production roles must be taken
     - All content produced must be original and produced by us/me
     - Music or audio effects from a copyright-free source may be used, but must be referenced

The brief asked us to make an original short film that would be entered into a film festival. Although my film did not get entered into the film festival because even though is was shit, post production was not complete therefore ruling out an exhibition at the festival. Despite this I did manage to produce a good short film that was under the 15 minute time limit. One of my biggest regrets was not going back to the client brief enough because if I had, I would've tried to develop my ideas further and possibly even introduce one or two other ideas which would've fit into the story-line seamlessly.When initially writing the script I thought the time limit was 10 minutes, which led to me being very cautious about what I wrote. I wrote the script on 14 pages which for most films would equate to at least 14 minutes because of the actions as well however, because my film is almost all dialogue, the run-time was equivalent to just under 10 minutes. This meant that I didn't go into as much depth with the dialogue as I wanted, however it did also mean that I accomplished the task.

I was very happy with the feedback that people gave to me, because they could recognise it was a short film and they also recognised the relevance of the issues that were talked about in the film. This was vital for me because it meant that people within my target audience found it compelling, thought provoking, enjoyable and simultaneously raising more awareness for the topics raised, all of this was part of my own personal goals when planning and making this short film. They were impressed by the decision to do the film in black and white, and I also think it added a element of intrigue and made the film more interesting and compelling.


"Potato" is a short drama film about two strangers talking about sexuality, racism and equal rights in general in a bar. One of the difficult things for me personally was to make sure that the film stayed as a drama, and didn't drift off into another sub-genre because of the significance of the topics. When writing the scripts I often found myself drifting off and slowly changing it into a comedy because it felt a bit stale and I wanted to add something special to the short film, but I had to remember the importance of the topics and not to make light of the serious topics plus if I did I'd also have to do it from both characters. Writing a compelling and realistic script was the hard part, the easier part was translating it into production. This was easier because the codes and conventions are common in the majority of film and TV so it was just a task of implementing them to my film. This includes things like shot-reverse-shot, over the shoulder shots, the voice overs I used, the titles and the black and white colouring.


As I was working on my own, I ended up doing all the work on pre-production, production and post-production because I had no one to help, but I think I managed well. This made the film more difficult to do as I was in control of everything meaning needed some help with some things like asking friends to review the script on multiple occasions to see if it still made sense and they would be interested in watching. I also had three friends come to production to help out, all three just held the microphone as i was in charge of directing lighting and camera. Post-production was completely done by me and the most difficult part was waiting for the band Hollow Coves to respond about me using their song in the film. I sent an e-mail to the e-mail on their contact page on their website and he got back to me later to say as long as I credited them, the band had no problems with me using their song.