G18 Personal Project: Facade
The final product of our project is a short film. Its narrative follows three brothers-in-arms and how the impact of mental health. Each one of them suffers from their own mental health issues. Tackling themes of masculinity, anxiety, self-esteem, isolation, and brotherhood.
We are developing our project by pitching together a narrative derived from one another’s personal experiences. We have utilised story circle breakdowns to develop our narrative and dive into the mind and emotions of each character.
Some challenges that we identified are some members of the group might not be as reliable as the rest. Another challenge that we identified is the locations we need for our shoots as we will need to gain permission for each location as all of them will be off site.
We managed the challenge of locations by contacting as many places as possible until one was available for use. Group members not being reliable was solved by us splitting up the workload. The more prominent tasks were given to the members of the group who are most likely to get it done on time.
It will benefit me going into the industry by giving me the experience of acting and writing for my own project. The aim of our film is to raise awareness and accurately represent men’s mental health, specifically, anxiety, loneliness and inferiority. We noticed that a lot of times when men’s mental health is shown in the media it’s often not as accurate representation of real life and so, we wanted to make a film that shows a more realistic depiction of these struggles.
First, we started by brainstorming ideas for our film, and we did this by creating a mind map of different words such as anxiety, toxic masculinity, loneliness etc. We then looked at how these different words are represented in media and what each of them mean and represent for men’s mental health. After we found our idea for our film we wrote the first draft of our script. We were satisfied with the first draft so when we rewrote the script for the next few drafts, we made minimal changes apart from making certain characters’ lines feel more natural. As there was little dialogue rehearsals went quickly and easily as the physical parts of the script weren’t too demanding. Then, when we started shooting the hardest part of shoots was outside variables such as weather ruining certain shots leading to us taking longer to film during shoot days or members of the public driving on the road whilst trying to shoot a scene on the streets. Finally, with editing we ran into many issues such as footage going missing, files corrupting and audio going missing. We were able to fix most of these issues quickly as the footage that was missing wasn’t a vital scene and wasn’t too necessary to the final project.
Some feedback I was given over the course of my project is that I need to act more present when I’m not the focus of the scene. So even if the focus is on another character, I still need to stay in character and continue to act my role for as long as I am on screen so that the scene doesn’t cross into disbelief. It also helps to not distract the other actors and take them out of the scene whilst they’re trying to perform.
Some skills I have learned over the course of doing the personal project are time management and performance. Over the course of the project, we had to plan and create our own timetables for shoot days, location recces, rehearsals and plans for moving equipment to different locations. As we had to plan everything ourselves, we had to make sure that we had a timetable that everyone can stick to and wouldn’t inconvenience any members of our group. Performance skills I learned was using emotion memory to draw out more emotion from myself and to give greater impact to the scene. I demonstrated this specifically with my character’s scene in the bathroom where he has a panic attack. I used my own experiences with panic attacks to try and make the scene more realistic and accurate to make it more impactful.
Things that I have learned about making my personal project is the process of developing and creating a short film from scratch. I already knew the process of filmmaking, but I had never been a part of it firsthand from the start. From the early stages of idea conception to rehearsals to actual shoot days to editing in post-production I have gained firsthand experience and insight into the process of making my own film. I learnt may things that I didn’t even think about before such as; how to get permission to film at certain locations and how to set up and light a scene using different equipment to give a scene a specific vibe.
