Sound Project

AS Media sound project

Shot types

Video Caption

Reflections

AS media preliminary task

For our preliminary media task we had to create a short film in which somebody asks for something and we chose a metaphysical approach with the seemingly rhetorical question ‘can i have my life back?’ only to have his reflection respond to his existential crisis with and answer.

There was not much pre-production involved as we wrote our short script with some basic shot outlines of how we were going to film it fairly quickly and improvised many ideas while shooting.

Production also went quite well with few problems. We decided to start with an establishing long shot to give an immediate insight to our character, Daniel, to show his age and, due to his clothes, where he was (i.e. school) and his mood which, due to his rushed pace, appears to be panic. We then followed this with a high angle shot made to resemble a CCTV camera to add a sense of realism to his environment. This was then followed by an over-the-shoulder tracking shot to emphasise his speed and urgency as the viewer attempts to catch up to him, it also uses a handheld style to add a heightened sense of reality to the scene. Upon entering a bathroom we used a close up action shot of the door handle followed by a reverse shot of him entering the room. For the section in which he speaks to his reflection we used shot-reverse-shot for the conversation cutting from our characters face to an over the shoulder shot where he is bent over facing the mirror but his reflection is standing upright, we chose to do this as we felt the different postures add a fantasy element to the reflection showing it isn’t in fact his real reflection but some kind of spirit or imaginary view of himself he’s talking to. we achieved this by having me double for Daniel’s body while having Daniel stand upright behind me being reflected in the mirror and once we found the correct angle made it appear as though i was looking at a reflection of sorts. Midway through we also did another handheld shot tracking his actions as he splashed his faced with water to tether the somewhat surreal scene to reality. Finally we ended on a note of ambiguity in this scene as Daniel’s reflection began to walk away from him then fade into non-existence. The film then ends with Daniel alone on a bench giving the viewer the impression he never did get his life back.

We did quite a few minor additions in post-production, such as to add a visual effect to the high angle shot giving a green distorted look akin to a CCTV camera as well as adding a subtitle reading ‘REC’ to give the illusion the camera is real and recording. Visual effects were also used to make Daniel’s reflection disappear by using a fading slide transition between a shot of Dans reflection and a shot from the same angle of an empty bathroom. We also added diegetic sound effects such as the door opening as well as footsteps and also the non-diegetic sound of music as Daniel is alone on the bench to emphasise his sadness which the bridged over to the credits.

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