"Ticket" Group Edit & Moving Image Evaluation

"Ticket" Group Edit from Samantha Freeman on Vimeo.

For this Moving Image project, the theme was “Interpretation”; where we were given a script and had to interpret it in our own way to produce a short film. My group consisted of me, Charis, Alyssa, Stephie, Alex and Lauren, and we were given the script called “Ticket”. We were also given roles straight away for our film crew – my role was the editor.
From reading the script we decided to base our film upon the main genre of romance, but did not want to make it typical to films seen so often in cinema today. To make ours different, however, we eventually decided upon a theme of 1960s French romance film, influenced by Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave film “Breathless" from 1960. We analysed the use of black and white, tone and music within clips from the film and tried to reflect similar techniques in our own edit.
Before any of this, there was a lot of planning and pre-production to be done before we could start filming. We overcame quite a few problems regarding risk assessment of location, as our planned location was either a bus or train station. We decided that it would nearly impossible to gain permission to film in such places, so compromised by filming in the Arboretum park nearby and using references of the tram and a tram ticket instead. Although this wasn’t original to the script and was considered a compromise at first, I think this was overall a successful piece of interpretation and adaptation of our script and shows problem solving to a reasonable standard.
We also had problems regarding organising actors, due to both male and female actors being unavailable at the last minute. We solved this by our director asking a male friend to help us out, and we ended up having our director, Alex, as our female actor in the end. Although this wasn’t ideal, I feel that using costume and props, etc. we were still able to convey the narrative and style quite well considering our actors were not professional.
However, I feel our two filming sessions went rather well and we got everything done relatively sufficiently. Our first filming session in, week 4 of our 5 week rotation, wasn’t as successful as we had hoped though, as we realised we didn’t get as many successful shots as we may have liked, so organised a final filming session within week 5 to ensure we had enough shots to edit together. I feel this is where we had some problems with team work due to a few members of our crew not turning up or contributing as much as we may have imagined they could.
As the editor, it was mainly my responsibility to cut all the shots and put them together into our film. As our style was 1960s romance, I also had to make each shot black and white, which made rendering a lot more tedious, but I feel it is worth it now the edit is uploaded. We also used a variety of quite obscure camera angles and shots that would not conventionally be put together, giving the film a more abstract, quirky style to fit in with our chosen genre.
I also feel we had some lack of team work during editing as it was mainly me and Alyssa (sound and production design) who stayed behind to edit our film, whereas the director did not get as involved as may have been necessary in a real film production team. Despite this, in our circumstances, I think there was sufficient effort from most of the crew, considering our director also took on the role of the female actor.