Decision evaluation

Decision evaluation

During the writing phase, I drew inspiration from the surroundings at my dad’s house, as there is an orchard on one side and a field on the other. This inspired me because I could imagine something happening within the orchard, and no one knowing due to them being well hidden. This was the starting point for my script, so I needed to develop a story from this. The idea of a murder came from the effectiveness of the orchard hiding whoever was in it, so I thought that this was the perfect place for a murderer to commit his crime.  In wanted my story to have a twist, so I thought of a person stumbling across the murder scene, and the killer giving the innocent person a choice of either possible death, or helping with the body and walking away. I thought that this was a good idea as it is a scenario not often seen in films, so was a unique twist. Between the scripts that I wrote for my short film ‘Decision’, I had to change quite a lot in order to make it more engaging and readable. One of these things was the show don’t tell rule, which is a key part in script writing. I needed to change some areas of the script to fit this rule, such as the first piece of dialogue:

Script 1 - Steven

(Checks phone)

I'm gonna be late. I haven't been here for ages. I think there's a pathway across one of these fields somewhere near here.

Script 2 - Steven

Great, I should just about make it in time, for once.

There were not many problems while filming, and the problems that did occur could be made right. An example of this is not having any fake blood for the body, so we used ketchup instead, which worked for the scene. One problem that I noticed too late was there being shadows of the people on camera and sound in one of the shots, however some people have said that they did not notice them. However, because of this, I will know to watch out for shadows in shot in future films.  Also, the editing was a bit tricky, as I could not find tweeting bird sounds that would fit the film, but eventually found some and altered the sound so it did not cause the dialogue to not be heard.

If I was to do this project again, there are things that I would change, such as some of the dialogue between the characters and possibly have another setting that would have been later on in the film in order to expand the story more. But overall, I think that this project went very well, with the actors and crew performing brilliantly.