Whilst producing 'Heroes in Ruin' i faced many obstacles in many different areas which all challenged me in their own unique ways and required me to develop more critical thinking. I had situations that required lots of work to fix, some situations that weren't fixable that needed some sort of alternative and even some situations that seemed really bad at first but ended up being quite a simple fix. I am going to evaluate the work i've done on this project and see what i could've done differently in the future.

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My pre production stage was quite delayed for this project as i had originally planned to make another film called 'man in the shadows' and so since i had changed my film idea it meant all of the time i had spent planning and writing this script was wasted unfortunately. However, i still believe it was smart to ditch this idea as despite the amount of time i spent on the script, i felt like i was writing myself in to a large loop which was too big to fit in to a short film. I really struggled to make 'man in the shadows' work in the production side of things as well, police crime scenes were required to be made up for this film which would've needed permission from local authorities and also the use of an ambulance, police tape and a fake dead body doll. As much as i would've liked to work on this film i just don't think i could've prepared my self for such a jump up in film production given the scale of my previous films. When developing a new script came i knew i wanted to stick with something familiar but also push my writing in terms of story, dialogue and characters and so i wanted to establish a well developed universe that is simple to understand whilst also being interesting for an audience to immerse themselves in to, this also meant i am able to stick with something i am familiar with now which is action sequence choreography. I decided to develop several different types of characters all with varying personalities and with their own agenda as well, i believe that because of these characters we are able to see the issues lying in this universe regarding community and how ever since the 'collapse' all of these people are divided as a country and throughout the film a few characters realize this and so this develops their characters a bit more by the end. This pre production phase was essential for me as i was now developing quite a complex story with rich lore that needed developing and so i spent a lot of time working on the script to ensure i was able to get the story and established universe across well in the film.

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During the production phase was where most of my issues lied which were unfortunately almost all out of my control. One thing that happened after my second shoot day was the clutch in my car had disconnected and so i had to pull over, move all of the props, equipment and costumes in to another car to take home and then get my car to a garage. This put a huge halt to production as i was the only driver of our main crew and i also had all of the essentials for making our films, i also live in a town which is a forty minutes drive from Weston and was very unsure of how i would return everything in time. I decided to message my lecturer for advice and speak with my other crew member Harley Bridgman as it was putting a halt to his filming also, originally we were planning for him to come down to my town and help get everything loaded onto a train then back to his flat. Fortunately my mum was available and offered to drive me with everything from my car down to Harley's flat, this put things back on track to an extent as we at least had everything we needed for filming in Weston. We then decided to use a taxi service and 'Uber' to travel to different filming locations. Another huge issue during production came with the weather, we were very unfortunate with the weather being a very low chance of rain on multiple shoot days and yet it still rained on two of those days. We weren't very prepared for rain as it was not expected to happen that day, we had to think on our feet and luckily managed to get waterproof material, protective plastic bags for equipment and also tarp sheets to keep our equipment on. However, the FX3 camera we were given had already gotten dirt on it before we had even begun filming which was a massive downgrade in quality, this was the best camera available to us at the time and despite our issues with it it was too late to get another one now. We tried our best and took all precautions necessary in order to keep the lens protected from rain water and dirt but given that i was acting for most scenes on these days i wasn't able to get a clear view of the shots to see how bad it is, a lot of shots were ruined because of this. We had also faced many other issues on set such as people walking into shot or talking in the background, trains passing by and needing toiletries in some of the locations we filmed at. Most of these issues we had to deal with on the day and because of all of these issues i had to solve i believe my problem solving skills have improved immensely despite the challenges faced.

 

When starting to edit this film i had faced several different types of problems, my first issue being that some of the shots didn't work too well together or just looked bad in general. The first big issue i had with this was from the final scene when 'Cobra' falls to the ground it looks way too unrealistic and that shot was all i had to work with, i tried speeding up this shot which only made it look goofier, i then decided to try and create a sort of unconscious effect with ringing ears sound effects mixed with making the shot fade out then back in again. This combination of effects made this shot much more convincing and improved the quality of this scene immensely.  I also had some continuity issues with the character 'Quick Shift' as i expected, this character's power is teleportation and so during production if this character was going to teleport in a scene i had to make sure to get a shot of him, then make sure the camera stays perfectly still and get another shot of just an empty background. The effect i used for this teleportation actually worked really well, the problem came with one of the shots when i was wearing the Quick Shift outfit and wasn't able to see how it looked, unfortunately the camera must've been knocked by my camera op and so ended up looking really bad in edit as the shot clearly moves. To resolve this issue i decided to zoom in both shots more to get them more precise with matching each other, this helped the problem but did not solve it, i then decided to try a few different video transitions for a smoother effect to which none of them really looked good until i tried 'film dissolve' which still made it noticeable with the shot changed but the transition was way smoother and less jumpy which looks a lot better in the film. One thing i was very happy with was the addition of comic panels between scenes, i had planned to do something like this anyway to introduce the next scenes but i was impressed with how they came out.

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To conclude this evaluation, this was the most issues i've ever had with a film and so took a lot for me to push through and still produce a final product despite the tribulations faced. I believe that despite all of these unfortunate situations and rough circumstances that i did the best i could with this film and am still very happy with how it turned out, in the future however it would have been better to plan my shoot days earlier in case of situations like my car or the equipment which caused massive disruption in production.