Marianne Schweitzer - Film studies Evaluation

Our task was to create a two minute extract from a film of our choice. The film that we chose to look into and that inspired us was Mean Girls ‘ Mark waters’ 2004, but as Mean girls is American we wanted to make our film more British, so something like the TV programme Skins. The reason why we chose to look into the film Mean girls is because we can relate to the film as it is based around our age group and is set in a college and is all about the problems teenagers have.
Our two minute film is based around the new girl ‘Plain Jane’; she is new to the college and doesn’t have very high expectations of the place. One of her biggest troubles is going to be finding a way to fit in with the other students. The three ‘popular ,pretty’ girls at college, Zoe, Hailey and Megan bump into Jane in the corridor, Jane drops her cigarettes, and Zoe and Hailey help themselves to them, The girls have a conversation with Jane and invite her outside for a cigarette, and that’s how the film opens.
The genre that we chose to focus on is something like a gritty high school drama/ comedy. Our two minute film starts by introducing each of the characters, I feel that the characters and narrative of our short film fit with the conventions of the genre, for example in these high school/ college dramas there is always the popular girls, who are the head of the school, and then there is always the ‘looser’ that doesn’t really fit in.. Our film starts with Jane, talking about how she is starting a new college. Then it cuts to Zoe, Hailey and Megan and the description of there characters, as we describe each of the characters, we have filmed them doing something that somes up there character, so this helps the audience understand them a little bit more, so for example we filmed Zoe out side having a cigarette and on the phone, socializing with her friends etc.

There was four of us in our group, and we all had our own responsibility, but I feel that we all worked together and did everything as a group, as we felt that was the best thing, Mary was the director, Scarlett was the camera man, Nina was the editor, and I was the sound director. We all contributed to every element.
As I was mainly the sound director, I had to first of all record Mary and Scarlett doing the voice overs of their characters, this took quite a while and a few takes to get it so it sounded perfect. With the voice over we wanted Scarlett who plays Janes character, to sound quite bubbly but also moody and down about starting a new college. We got Mary to do the voice overs for Zoe, Megan and Hailey. We wanted Mary to sound quite loud and strong minded, but also quite common and fun. We were thought of having each of us doing our own voice over, but it sounded better with just one voice describing all three of the characters.
I also had to create music for our film; I did this with Scarlett on the programme garage band. We have used it before so we knew what we had to do and how it works.
We wanted to create a piece of music like something from the film mean girls, there is a scene from mean girls where the three popular girls are walking down the corridor, and that type of music suites it very well. We wanted to create something quite happy, that is also dramatic. It was quite hard making the music in a short amount of time. One thing we found difficult about making the music is some of the sample pieces sounded quite action like, so it was hard as we didn’t want it to sound like an action movie.
When Scarlett and I made the music we thought it was going to fit, but when we put it with the film it didn’t suit so we decided to leave it off. I feel the reason it didn’t fit is because it was to fast paced, and didn’t sound like the type of music suitable for this genre.
Another aspect of the sound that me and Scarlett were responsible for were the sound effects, things like footsteps and noise in the background. We added some sound effects and thought they sounded good but when we played the film to the rest of the group some of the sound effects didn’t fit well, so I think we should have added more layers of sound to make it more realistic.
I feel we worked well as a group creating the narrative and characters, we all put forward ideas and went with the best one, we all got along as a group and we had no disagreements. As we went along we decided to change things such as ideas we had at the start, for example we were going to get extras to say things about the three popular girls, but we decided that we didn’t want to go with that idea. Also we get to Jane drop her cigarettes, well when we first came up with this idea the cigarettes were actually ment to be drugs, but this then changes things, so we thought it would be best to have them as cigarettes.
I think I have learnt alot just after watching it and showing it to our peers, we got other students positives, and criticisms about our film and fell this has really helped.
One thing I noticed about the beginning is that it really drags on and is way to long as there are too many establishing shots and loads of shots of the college.
I feel we could have made our film a lot better, one thing that we all admitted is that we pictured it differently in our heads than to the end product that we produced, it is very hard to create something similar to is what’s in your head.
It would have been better if we had sorted out the sound. I have learnt a lot from doing this project and feel as a group we could improve drastically just from comments we received from other students.