Evaluation- Preliminary Task: 'Blind Date'- Part I

Team Members: Tom Leatherbarrow, Liam Rodden, Marc Timko

For our preliminary task we were given the brief: to create a short film, of a character walking down a corridor, through a door, and having a conversation with another person on the other side of the door. We were to make continuity and consistency the key focus and use the 180 degree rule. However, in order to make the film interesting as well as ‘ticking all the boxes’ we decided to add a more defined narrative to the production.

After toying with some ideas, in a group, across a range of genre, we settled on my idea of ‘speed dating’, with the natural choice of genre being comedy. We first came up with the idea of a woman walking through a door, sitting down, opposite a man who then shoots her without much conversation. However, we decided that we could develop the idea of speed dating further, and so we began to write characters- all of whom would have some kind of abnormality. These characters constructed the narrative- the story of Holly, a slightly desperate, but generally normal woman, who has turned to speed dating and comes face to face with a variety of ridiculous characters throughout the evening, before she gives up and leaves.

We then decided on a location- the school stage, as this was the most none descript in terms of background, within school, in which we could film. Filming in school was most convenient, due to the hiring of the equipment and the amount of actors and crew we needed. We therefore specified that the speed dating night would be for parents, thus the premise for it being set in a school. So Liam and I got verbal permission from Mr Baynes for usage of the hall after school hours and Mr Green for usage of the stage.

After this Liam and I wrote the script, whilst Marc made a Production Schedule and Health and Safety Risk Assessment. We wrote the script fairly quickly, narrowing our wealth of characters down to six of the most abnormal people we could think of: Derrick, a middle aged suspected paedophile with an extreme attraction to cats; Pierre, a handsome but unintelligible French man; Brackus, a wannabe gangster and borderline sex-pest; Gary and Simon, argumentative conjoined twins; Gerald an attractive male, originally scripted with a lizard tongue, but owing to the difficulties that came with finding a lizards tongue, had instead to throw up a large amount of spaghetti, and finally an ageing, deranged Harry Potter, who has become disillusioned with the world of fame and has resorted to mindless violence and sex.

Once we had got the script, synopsis, risk assessment and production schedule, we went about scouting actors to be in our production, with a grand total of eight actors needed for the production. These we found with relative ease, we briefed them on their roles and we arranged a time for us to film. This we added to the production schedule, and we commenced filming on the 8^th November 2010, at 16:00PM.

We had some hiccups in that we couldn’t use the equipment that we had hired out, as people had taken it without having written a signing out form. This set us back slightly as we didn’t want to start setting up the set until we were sure we’d actually be able to film. Then we were told we couldn’t use the stage lights as planned, for some unknown reason. So, in the end we managed to find one camera and tripod (as opposed to the two that we signed out) and we had to use the single redhead from the media stock to light the scene. This meant that filming would take longer, and lighting, inevitably would be worse.

Furthermore, three of our actors that had agreed to take part pulled out at the last minute, meaning we had to use the actors we had in various different roles. However, apart from these setbacks, filming ran fairly smoothly. I filmed, lit, and co-directed the production, with Liam focussing more on acting direction and I on technical direction.