PLANNING:

Overall I felt as though my planning was quite thorough, especially when it came to the interview questions that I was asking my mum – that meant that i was really prepared and provided some great audio for me. One thing that I did struggle when it came to planning was the visuals for my film. I wanted the movie to be hard hitting although I knew it would be unethical and uncomfortable for my mum if I were to film her ‘being ill’ essentially. I pondered for a long time on what I wanted to actually film, and in the end I came up with most of my visuals on the spot as my planning in this area wasn’t too detailed. The ‘where’ part of my planning was easy – as it all took place in my home, however I also did end up getting some footage outside the house at the shop – highlighting that I came up with a lot of my visuals on the spot. Overall, I think my planning process was okay, I feel as though I should’ve been more thorough when it came to planning the actual footage since I found myself stuck for ideas a lot of the time – leading to some not so interesting or visually pleasing footage.

EXECUTION:

As I’ve mentioned, I struggled to come up with some interesting pieces of footage. I took a documentary style approach to my work, I began filming on a canon DSLR camera however I found this hard to use and inconvenient at times. This is because sometimes I would have to quickly get out my camera if I noticed my Mum was breathless, therefore it was easier to film a lot of the footage on my IPhone that I always had on me. However though, the filming process was an easy and enjoyable one and bought me closer to my mum to understanding her illness. One thing I did find difficult is making the footage aesthetically pleasing in some way or another. At times my visuals were not that clear and generally not that interesting. So, if I were to change anything it would be to figure out how to make a documentary style movie aesthetically pleasing. The execution of filming wasn’t a very time consuming process since each bit of footage was quite short, however coming up with visuals to match the audio was a tricky part.

EDITING:

Generally, editing was a really time consuming process. The audio was one of the most lengthy process as I had to listen to 10/15 minutes of footage a number of times and cut out the pieces that I wanted and the bits I didn’t want. I managed to slim the audio down to about 3 minutes and as you can imagine this took a lot of time, as I wanted the most important, hard-hitting bits of information in my film. Adding and editing the visuals was a fairly easy process, it was just a case of cutting out the bits that I didn’t want or need, bits that weren’t visually pleasing at all or bits that weren’t clear with bad framing. However, I did really well when it came to editing and I feel very confident when it comes to using Premiere.

Overall:

I am really pleased with how my film turned out. My favorite element of the film is the audio of my mum speaking, I feel as though she answered the questions really well and that is what made the film the most emotionally moving. One thing I would change about the movie is some of the footage, as mentioned before I wish I was able to express my mum’s illness a little bit better while still being aesthetic/visually pleasing however this was difficult to balance at times. However, it is one of my favorite final pieces that I have made and I’m glad I could show my understanding and empathy for my mother through a film.