MEDI 119 (Larping About: Project Report.)

Larping About: Project Report. 

The first stage of the work for this movie was location scouting and a casting call. I chose to be experimental and use a social networking site for my casting call as I felt that it would be able to reach a wider audience than more conventional methods and although it did... It didn’t spark as much interest as I thought it would. So sadly I was left on the day of shooting with a number of actors far fewer than the hundreds I needed for the script. Also I had to vastly downscale the location as on a budget of nothing it would have been extremely hard to get everyone to the original location picked.

This lead into a very quick rewriting of the script and although the storyline was good it didn’t cover 5 minutes which found out much later in post production. This meant with time constraints I had to find a way to work the story in with the little footage I managed to be able to get. The actual filming went fairly smoothly due to good weather and a decent camera. However there were a lot of difficulties keeping everyone quiet on the set and co ordinate with what was meant to be happening. I feel that it went well and that I was flexible and everyone added something to the piece and in the end it’s all very playful and fun and lively. I used a mixture of Tripod and handheld filming and I think that they blended together alright.

The hardest, longest and most intense stage of this was the editing for me since I have never done anything like this. It took weeks and weeks and there were so many issues due to faulty tape decks that in the end I had to ask assistance from a friend of mine that is handy with fire wire technology to be able to salvage my film. Because of the problems it took a couple of days intensive editing to be able to be ready for the deadline.

I didn’t expect that post production would take so long and I think this was a major problem since it left me very little time for a reshoot and trying to organise one to fit all the actors and add more in proved so difficult that I couldn’t go ahead with one before the due date.

I was going to have a voice over but the voice actor’s mobility problems owing to a sporting injury prevented him from making studio time so I instead opted for a soundtrack. The music used in my sound track was chosen specifically with my film in mind and is copy write under creative commons and so is free to use as long as it’s not for commercial use.

On the whole I feel I could have organised the time better and would do so in the future now that I have a firmer grasp of the time constraints of each segment of this. I do feel that however I did well given my lack of experience with handling the tasks needed to implement my project.

Video Link