Evaluation of film - Scarlett Creasey-Squire

Our films genre is teen movies, however we wanted to make it more British based on the TV series ‘Skins’ rather than Americanised teen films such as ‘The Breakfast Club’. We watched clips of these films and others, such a ‘Mean Girls’ and tried to pick out the main conventions in them all which we would have to incorporate within ours.
My role in the film was camera and cinematographer. We chose to film at college as it fits the genre of the film and also we have use of all the facilities around the college, making it our best, easiest option. However, from the outside ‘Long Road’ does not look like a typical high school or college. This made it harder for me being in charge of the camera as I had to find shots that made the it look like we were in a college, for example filming lockers and the cafe, the sports field and people in the quad. Another features we were going to include in our film was different groups of people are the college, like in a generic American teen film they have for example the jocks, the geeks and the cheerleaders. However this posed a problem for us as people around college have a choice of clothes and none of them really stick out. It would have been too much trouble to ask different people to wear certain clothes to we opted against the idea. The only person in the film that had a costume was the ‘Plain Jane’ character which we chose so she would stand out more against the others. We discussed within the group and decided it would be to act the roles ourselves as we knew how we wanted our film to look and thought by using ourselves we could incorporate our ideas better.
One of the main problems we felt with our film was we had so many ideas within the group that we found hard to fit them all in and also just film in general. With so many ideas we did not have a definitive narrative structure, which made it harder for us as a group as we did not have a solid plan to follow as we went along. Instead we kept changing and alternating our ideas, which left us not much time to film or edit.