Project Evaluation

Project Evaluation

At the beginning on this unit i was very excited to get going because i love to direct. I finally took it into my own hands to practice hiring actors and asking other for locations. It wasn't an easy job but it prepared me for bigger projects that are about to arise. What i wanted to focus on mostly in this project was the Lighting and colour grading due to that being David Fincher's key style. When i looked into his work i know that one things i had to live up to was Fincher's colour tints.

I really think i worked very hard on this project, i really wanted it to come out perfectly and the way in envisioned it. Of course there is a lot of room for improvement but in contrast to my first project it is a huge difference and a massive step up. When i was preparing for this project i felt ready, i really felt like i knew what i wanted to do and that made it much easier for me, unlike the first unit i was not as prepared and that is why i feel like my first project wasn't as good as this one. 

When hiring actors and asking permission for locations it wasn't as hard as i thought it would be, it was fairly simple and a lot of people were happy to help which made it easier for me. I was a little paranoid at the beginning because i thought that because i am a student not a lot of peopler would want to help me but i was totally wrong. All of my actors were brilliant but i feel like my main actor who played 'Edward Norton' could have been adjusted to someone who would fit that character more but since i had a few actors drop out he was still fantastic. I now keep in contact with all my actors since they were so brilliant and showed interest in working with me again. Even though i had quite a lot of work to do but not everything went very smoothly, first problem that happened was when one of my actors dropped out but that did not stop me from looking for others, things like that happen every day. One of my locations dropped out also, i first planned to film at the Hilton Hotel in dartford since it was closer for my actors but 2 days later Hilton emailed me saying that i am not able to film there due to having copyright issues, i started to panic due to my filming day being 3 days away i started to look and contacted a lot of hotels around maidstone until finding one that would let me film on such short notice. It was brilliant that we received a hotel room finally but one bad thing about it was that it was tiny! but we had to work with what we were given. It was harder than usual to set up since we had lighting kits and the track and dolley. It was very difficult but we had to make it work, i wanted to make sure that on screen you could not tell that the hotel room was small and we had the issue with setting up and it came across the way i wanted to. 

Everyone was on set on time and ready, all of my actors came with a lot of enthusiasm and it made the day go quicker and made it much more fun for everyone. We began the shoot at around 10:00am and finished at 4:00pm, i treated everyone to pizza and snacks afterwards and we all enjoyed each-others company. I paid for all of my actors travels and they were still willing to do more for me even with spending not much on them which was very generous on them. Overall i think the filming day was brilliant and my actors were fantastic. My post production process was very enjoyable i loved to edit and play around with the colour tints and exposures. I really love David Fincher's work and how his pro-production make his projects come to life, i really wanted to do the same. While editing i found it a little difficult to add some scenes that i have not gotten filmed.

As we can see in this shot you really can't see either characters, and i did not notice this while i was filming which was a big problem! When i started to edit the video i realised that i was in trouble and i had no way to fix this since i have not filmed any other shots due to the hotel room being so small. Simon did mention that i should add close ups of Tyler Durden and i did but not in this scene where it would have made a dramatic difference.

We live and learn from mistakes and i need to make sure that in my next project this does not happen and i take multiple different shots from different angles to avoid this situation that i was in. Overall the colour grading fitted in very well with the Fincher style blue/green tints, i was really happy with the outcome of colours, sound and camera work. There is still room to improve this even further and i plan to do that even after i hand in this project. Comparing my post-production in my last unit to this one there is a massive difference, within this unit i have learn so much more with Adobe Premier and how to edit properly rather than in the first uni and you can really see the difference. I did think that some of the sound was not in sync but i tried to fix it the best way possible, it is not perfect but it was done to the best of my ability. I really do love the first scene where Edward Norton walks into the bar, the colour grading and lighting looks amazing and the way that the small details show on camera makes the place look wonderful and interesting for the viewers. 

Overall i was very proud of this project and myself in general, i didn't think i could pull this off and i did. I worked really hard on this and it really paid off, i was happy with my actors performance and how the locations looked overall in the post-production. I really loved learning how to Direct properly and how to treat my crew in the right way so i could keep them around. Being a director isn't easy as you have a lot of responsibilities but i can see myself being one.