I had the idea to use a lot of technical camerawork and editing to represent the confusion in Jason’s mind. Although it is quite humourous at times, the film is about serious matters and tries to shock the audience at how close to death Jason is. Sometimes small sections of black comedy come out in the film, I used this because it helped move the plot forward in a more creative and fun way than just having 'normal' dialogue. I wrote and directed the film and had some help from friends as for example: I couldn't film when I was acting and so needed a cameraman. I explained my film and ideas behind it at the beginning of the filming process and everyone involved was very enthusiastic about it – I think this helped a lot when creating the film as we filmed shots many different times and from many different angles.
When creating the film there were a lot of complications that occurred. One big complication was that we could only access the garage (where we were filming the film) on Sundays, so we had to organise it so that we could all meet on certain days – some were a month or so apart. Another one was the fact that sometimes the weather would not be suitable to film outside (maybe snowing or raining). These two big implications created many other smaller issues – for example our haircuts would slowly change over time and so we’d have to try and keep them almost the same as when we started.
Camerawork
We rarely used a tripod when filming and mainly had informal composition when filming. This was due to the fact that we wanted to keep a sense of confusion throughout the beginning of film and we felt that a tripod would give the camera (and in effect, the story) some stability, which we didn’t want until the ending (when things start to slow down and he is about to wake up again). We also wanted to keep the camera very close to what was going on in the scene – giving the audience explicit detail as to what is happening in each and every scene. It also allowed the audience to create an emotional bond with the characters.
Editing
After looking at all of the footage that we had, I calculated that the film would be over the time limit that I was allowed for the task. However, I didn’t want to lose a lot of the shots that we had created, leading me to the conclusion that I would have to create a ‘Director’s Cut’ of the film, then edit a shorter version. I preferred the Director’s cut as I felt that it communicated the meaning of the film to the audience better, but I did my best with the cut down version to convey the points that I wished to convey.
Sound
When editing the sound of the film together I tried many different rough cuts of the film before settling on the final version. I even contacted my friend David Clarke to get him to create a song for it, later deciding that it worked better without the song. Also when editing I noticed a few shot where you could hear the cameraman breathing, I could not get around using these shots as I had run out of time to re-record the sound. Instead I took parts of ‘empty sound’ from in between speech in other shots and placed these sound clips in the parts that you could hear the cameraman – thus covering up most times when you could hear the cameraman. There were also some shots when Jason is running, in which the noise of the wind is overpowering. In this instance I turned the volume down for these clips, so it is not as predominant in the scenes. I did try to re-record the sound for these clips, but couldn’t edit them in a manner that sounded natural for the footsteps that were onscreen. Finally, the opening shot of Aaron’s feet walking towards the door was filmed by me dragging Rudi across the floor, creating a noise. When filming the shot, we realised this, so immediately re-recorded some of Jay’s footsteps to be edited in afterwards. This worked in my favour as it didn’t take much to replace the sounds and it looked fairly natural in the final cut.
Mise-en-scene
We had a few problems with mise-en-scene from the beginning. This was because we kept starting to film in certain clothes, then these clothes would get lost, or would be in the wash the next time we filmed (relating back to my other point of us only being able to film on some Sundays). But overall I liked the mise-en-scene we had – costumes were like the characters I had in mind, set and props were also very close to what I had in mind. However, I didn’t realise that the spray room at the garage had a door at the back – we covered it up in most shots, then realised we could use it to our advantage towards the end of the film and kicked Jason through it.
Overall, I feel that my film progression was very slow, but we ended up with a very good product at the end of it all.
