Reflective analysis

Creative Process

For my film project i chose to create a short film in the genre of a post apocalyptic thriller. I took inspiration from this through films such as 'I am Legend' and '28 days later' as these were the films i found to be most interesting to analyse in terms of micro and macro elements. The creative process of the production was much harder and longer then i thought initially as a lot of our time was spent planning ahead and re scheduling events. The first step within my creative process was researching and listing several different ideas based around the post apocalyptic genre. I found that this was very beneficial as we changed our narrative around several times before we decided upon the film we had created. This was an important process as it allowed me to gain a deeper insight into the genre and also allowed us to better our narrative. Within my group consisting of me and Josh Holtby we thought long and hard about what features would appeal to our target audience and how we could create a film that would use many of the conventions of an apocalyptic thriller. With the Aims and Context created it gave me a clearer idea of how i wanted and needed the film to look by having a lot of high angled shots, eerie music and slow motion effects.

The next step within the creative process was to create a storyboard which would indicate the shots and screenplay that would be used within the film. However most of all the storyboard helped me to see how the narrative would look in a film context which was very helpful as some of the shots did not make sense together so i was able to alter them and vastly improve the quality of the narrative. I then turned the storyboard into an animatic which involves taking photos of the storyboard and putting them together into a film style slide show on windows movie maker. This allowed me to improve on our timings of the different shots as it allowed us to see it in motion. Throughout the creative process of the project myself and josh had various production meetings which helped us to reflect on ideas and discuss what we need to complete. This was a very helpful step in the creative process as it allowed us to keep on top of time management and also to improve the quality of the Film.

Within the creative process we encountered a number of problematics which at the time proved to be very serious. The first problem was that as soon as we started filing our protagonist had a very noticeable hair cut. This set us back a lot as we had planned and put a lot of time and effort into sorting out various props and locations. Also we was very happy with some of the shots we had captured on the day. However we overcame this problem by rescheduling a new shoot which proved to be a big improvement on the first as we thought again about the cinematography and added more variations of shots.

Another problematic was realising that our footage was not going as we planned as some of the various shots from the animatic were restricting and didn't work well within the context of the genre. To overcome this i made various changes to the narrative which we were much happier with as this change allowed us to be much more creative and gave us a lot of opportunity's for some great shots.

Looking at the creative process through a cinematography point of view was one of my favourite things about the whole of the project. Doing things such as selecting the perfect angles, movements and shots to fit in perfectly with the genre. We tried to make the college look as empty and creepy as possible by using cantered angle, high angle and long tracking shots to emphasise the isolation of our protagonist. I decided to change and improve the shot types as some of them didn't fit in well with genre. Once we had completed the filming we uploaded it straight onto the editing suites using a fire wire cable and began editing on adobe premiere.

The creative process of the editing was the most interesting part as it was great see the sequences coming together to create something that looked very fitting within the genre. The rate stretch tool proved very useful because it allowed us to create a slow motion effect that fitted in very well with the genre conventions. The only part i found tricky within the editing was the timings at the beginning fitting in with the music as at first it juxtaposed with the sequence however after looking at the film again and again i finally found a way to place it in correctly making them work harmoniously together.

I definitely think that working in a small group was a great way to tackle this project as it gave us just the right amount of time to plan out and execute our specific individual t6asks. This also helped because it allowed us to keep improving and bettering our film by disagreeing and bouncing ideas off each other.


I believe that my film has been very successful in relation to its audience, aims and context. The first reason for this is because we planned to appeal to an audience who preferred a thoughtful narrative to high octane action. The narrative which we have created makes you think about it and also involves you emotionally within the diegetic world. My aim was to use the stylistic elements which i learnt last year and apply them to my film project which i think i have done very successfully. The only thing i didn't feel was successful within our film was the lack of acting skills which our protagonist possessed as his lack of emotion proved to make the narrative less effective and believable.