Self-Assessment Essay

Interrogation is a story of a young man who has been lead down a bad track by a combination of peer pressure and bad decisions. The film is supposed to depict the struggles that young men have with peer pressure and dealing with the fact that it’s time to grow up. We wanted to create a film that could be influential and relatable to students who were about to face the leap and join the real world. One of the main influences to our film was the flashbacks from ‘Source Code’, which split up the main narrative of the film and added a depth to the structure, rather than it just being a linear timeline.  I was appointed director of the film, Phil Johnson was editor and as he was responsible for getting the final vision to the screen, we decided he should also be an assistant director on set. Nathan was originally given the role of Director of Photography and Camera Operator, however, due to him showing a lack of enthusiasm and not showing up to the majority of production meetings, we made a collective decision to give Rob Hughes the position instead and have Nathan as a cameraman. 

Once we had decided on the idea for the project; Phil and I sat down to flesh out a rough script. I think this stage of the process happened a lot quicker having only two of us doing it, although we had had some input of ideas from Rob, which we implemented. We then took our script to the whole group and made changes accordingly. One of the biggest problems we faced in the planning stages of the project was sourcing performers. In fact, this was a problem that we took right up to the filming. We had such a problem sourcing extras; we had to completely change the layout of our poker scene, as there weren’t enough bodies to fill the whole room. I think this problem would have been easier to resolve if there was a budget to pay the extras for their time. The other problem I faced with using less skilled actors was them not remaining professional whilst in the background of a shot. So there was several wasted takes where some of the extras have started laughing or doing something inappropriate. In terms of post-production, Phil did the majority of the editing. One of the main issues he had was getting the sound right. This was down to several factors, such as only using a mono microphone input, meaning there was a dead channel that developed unwanted noise. The other issue was the fact that we forgot to use a clapped board for the majority of the scenes so syncing audio was an issue.

Overall, I feel the project has gone well and the final outcome has got very good feedback from people when screened. If I were to start the project again I would definitely keep a closer eye on what shots are looking like, especially the dolly zoom shots, as the moving dolly makes it hard to get a live feed from the camera. I would also plan more time to brief the actors before we get to location, as I spent a lot of time doing this on set which made it harder to look at the shots from a technical point of you.