Production Roles - Miss Miller

Within the creation of a film, specific roles will need to be assigned to ensure who is doing what job in order to be fully organised when filming and so both cast and crew are completely focused on their role. Stress is also taken away from the situation as one person will not have to be responsible for a number of different roles as well as not having to worry about roles carried out by other peers. Within the film industry, there are a wide variety of different roles which are each significant when creating a film both on and off screen. For example, the most significant of these being the director and producer. A director's job is to watch everything which is happening on set and be responsible for organising the actors in the way he/she wants to achieve the most successful shot. The producer works alongside the director and takes care of the finance side of things as well as managing the specific way each shot is coordinated and also how the film looks as a whole.

When creating my own thriller sequence, both my partner and I alternated the roles between us and ensured that we were doing equal amounts of work as well as working together in some circumstances to help one another. This allowed for us to work calmly and efficiently which made our filming time a lot shorter. In order to decide which role was to be undertaken by each of us, we discussed our strengths and weaknesses with each other to achieve an understanding of who could do which role. For example, if one of our weaknesses was achieving particular camera shots, the other person would do the harder shots and the other doing the easier ones in order to make the most successful and professional looking thriller. From this point, as I was one of the actresses within the film, we decided that Kate should do most of the filming however I would  give help wherever needed so as to not place all responsibility of filming on her. When filming the first time around, Kate struggled considerably and we were often arguing as she kept asking for help on how she could achieve each shot which made the filming environment extremely stressful. Our main problem was that we only used a tripod within the murder scene and forgot to focus the camera before we began filming therefore many of our shots were constantly out of focus and the entire sequence looked extremely unprofessional and messy so we were asked to film again. Although both Kate and I were extremely disheartened at this point, we were able to find another actor who took the role much more seriously and we began to have hope again that our sequence could actually turn out at a good standard.

When filming for the second time, we shared each role in order to relieve stress that had been evident when filming previously. As Kate had struggled with the camera work, I made sure that I was helping her with the shots which I weren't in for example the first scene in which the hit man/hostage is seen waking up from his unconscious state. I made a lot of suggestions so as to improve the appearance of each individual shot which we succeeded with and was able to make this half of the sequence look very professional and smooth. I think that we both felt that this time round, the filming ran much more smoothly and we were able to work better together so there was no stress evident. Both Kate and I enjoyed the filming as we were well coordinated and made a number of suggestions for ways that the film could be altered to make it even better which it did. Within the editing process, we also took on separate roles in which I was mainly responsible for editing the sound onto the clips, detaching the audio and making sure that the sequence flowed with the correct pace. Kate did a majority of the cropping so we were able to edit out additional parts off some of the clips to shorten the sequence and make it more realistic for us to achieve a sequence which would be at least 2 minutes long, a minimum time which we were given. I was also responsible for creating the opening credits which we would be showing over the images that we had already filmed, I also chose appropriate editing styles for the text to evoke certain emotions from the audience and get them hooked on the narrative straight away. Both myself and Harry Donoghue were the main actors within the film. We had to completely scrap the idea of having an antagonist character within the sequence as the original actor who was supposed to be playing this role backed out at the last minute so we decided to not include an antagonist at all which was very effective as it helped to keep his identity hidden. Harry is a drama student and he was therefore able to get into his actor and take the role seriously which made filming a lot easier and also helped the thriller to look very realistic due to the acting being natural and professional. Both Kate and I were very pleased to have Harry be a part of our film as we believe that he helped us to create a sequence which is significantly better than our first take and would therefore aid us in getting a much higher grade which is a positive outcome. The role of director was taken out by both Kate and myself as we worked together on placing Harry in the positions of where we wanted him to be in each shot as well as guiding him of what to do to achieve the effect we had planned. I also took on some crew roles such as makeup artist in which I applied Harry's fake blood to make it look realistic that he had been kidnapped and held hostage as well as applying my own within my murder scene in which I was slit across the throat. I think that this makeup also helped the sequence to look much more thrilling and realistic as it gives the audience a visual representation of the injury inflicted upon these particular characters which would evoke key elements of shock, surprise, tension and suspense. We also both took on the Producer role as we both combined each of our ideas, using our individual storyboards, to gather an overall feel of what we wanted the sequence to look like when constructing our group storyboard.

To conclude, I believe that Kate and I worked well together in carrying out our specific roles and believed that we correctly assigned these and was efficient when working on the filming. We also believe that we were both suited to the particular roles as we were doing things that we enjoyed and were good at which enabled our thriller sequence to look as professional as can be. Both cast and crew all got along really well therefore we were all able to work together which made filming the second time around much more efficient and easy. As previously stated, it was a delight to have Harry working on our film as he was the best possible actor to have as he took the role seriously and the whole sequence is of a high standard in our own opinion.