My short film is now completely finished I am quite happy with the way it has turned out despite some minor problems and setbacks I have had. On a whole I don't think my short film is that bad as I think it portrays everything I set out to do when I first had my idea for this short film. The look of my short film is quite different compared to conventional short films as it is a stop frame animation although for this particular narrative I think it works quite well as it adds to the quirkiness of my film. I think more time should have been spent on working out the lighting as some of the pictures are too light and make the character look too washed out, which make the film look very amateur. Another way my film can be improved is the background music as I think it works well to a certain extent but can be improved especially the bowling alley sound effects as they don’t look as if they are synced properly to what going on in the film. My short film changed slightly from my original planed storyboard this was due to a number of reasons my main problem being able to get the locations I wanted. I also cut some scenes out such as the park scene as I thought it would make my film far too long and the audience would lose interest in my short film and I didn’t want that.
I think my film will entertain quite a wide ranged audience of quirky people who like light hearted films as that is just what ‘Chuckles and Me’ is. The whole atmosphere of the film I think the audience watching will like as it is just simple and nothing to dramatic and heavy it is just a fun short film of which I don’t think there are many like it. My narrative structure I think the audience will like as the voice will engage them as it tells the story as you see it. My short film is a stop frame animation and i think the constant movement of each frame will keep the audience attention.
Working individually helped me produce a better short film as I only had myself and no one else I had to rely on and I only had one actor for my short film so everything was kept small and the fact I used a digital camera to shoot my short film on so there for it was a lot easier to do and allowed me to achieve the effect I wanted for my short film. As my film was a stop frame animation and is made completely of digital stills I found the edit quite easy to do although quite time consuming as it needed rendering quite a fair few times, it also took me quite a while to sort out the timings of my short film and figure out the durations of each image as at first there were far too many images and it was too fast therefore making the whole film not look like stop frame at all and it just looked very glichy so after I solved this problem of working out which images to cut and the duration I was happy although adding the music and voice over didn’t take long it was still quite tedious as I had to sync the voice over of which wasn’t long enough for my sequence of images so I have to slice and paste it and change the order of what it was saying as well as trying to make it make sense as best as I could. Once this was all done my short film was complete and I was pleased with it.
After researching in to short films I was highly influenced by Michel Gondry and his original short film, this is how I changed my straight way of thinking and decided to do a film with such an unusual narrative. Although when doing the ideas generation exercises the main idea for my short film came from a post secret post card that said ‘I still talk to my child hood bear’ and from them I developed my idea in to what my final film is now. Another short film called ‘Sukumvit Road’ of which was made by a Brit school student; inspired me hugely as it was from watching the stop frame in this that I decided I wanted my short film to also be a stop frame animation as I wanted a similar atmosphere as to what that student had achieved with her short film.
Overall I am quite happy with the way my short film has turned out however I know if I was to do this project again I know what I would be doing differently. I know I would definitely be working individually as I preferred doing so. I think for this particular project my planning was a lot better than previous projects although the smaller details like the music choice I could have taken more time with. Despite these things I am proud of my short film and thoroughly enjoyed making it.
