4 Hour Film Challenge: Doors

For this 4 hour film challenge we were tasked with making a film that had a narrative focus on doors, which really let us open our minds on what we could do, but however the brief also stated that the film had to have some continuity editing to show a linear narrative. So for our idea we (we being me Jack and Morgan) decided that we would aim for a more comedic narrative.

So, the full idea we came up with was the narrative of someone who was so mind mindbogglingly dumb that they never figured out how to open doors in their life, of course though we did have a multitude of other ideas such as opening the same door to different places each time however this was agreed to be tricky to film and edit, so we stuck with the idea of an idiot who can't open doors. When choosing how to shoot this film it was actually quite simple, as we picked a corridor that had two sets of double doors with clear windows, the clear windows being a very specific thing we needed as it allowed us to film from multiple angles and both sides of the door. As seen the footage we got was quite simple to shoot as it just involved the actor to run into the door a few times and struggle to open it and walk through, what made the comedy come out however was the editing we did, for example when the idiot first runs into the door you get two shots with quick pace editing to emphasise his effort to reach the door before it closes one of a medium shot of him running then a quick cut to a close up of him hitting the glass face first. We then keep the continuity by showing the next shot of him sliding down the glass and onto the floor, and then we have a long shot of him on the floor and the smart character walking towards the door which then cuts to a high angle close up of the idiot on the floor, all of this was to keep continuity in the narrative. When it comes to the audio we also decided to cut any diegetic sound and strictly keep it non-diegetic with a comedic piano piece that resembles the original music pieces that films like charlie chaplin or laurel and hardy had to go with the footage. And to match the style of old timey comedy we went with an old film reel effect to lay over the top.

Personally I am very pleased with how this short film turned out as our ideas we came up with worked really well in the final product, and fit the brief perfectly that we had to originally follow. However some criticisms we had and from other people were that we could have increased the pace of the footage and editing nearer the end to match the music piece more, and also probably reduce the length of some shots. One other issue we had was getting some of the shots which were a result of the wrong lens we had originally picked which for the next challenge we need to ensure we pick the right lens or maybe even multiple lenses to achieve the shots we want.