Chantage is finally here! After long hours of planning, filming and editing, we can finally say that Chantage is D-O-N-E! We actually produced a coloured version as well as the black and white version in order to find out which one was best. After conducting some more audience research based on the two finished films, coming to the conclusion to release the black and white Chantage..
Here it is:
Evaluation of Chantage
The final film has it's good sides and it's bad ones. The actual film itself comes across as very confusing and unless you've read the premise or the rest of this blog it may not make any sense at all. It wasn't until we began filming when I began to realise how hard it is to make a film in five minutes, it's very hard to make a story that makes sense and lasts only five minutes. However, we worked with what we had and it didn't turn out too bad. What's confusing is the characters and their relationships with each other. What many people didn't realise is that Roy and Vivian are brother and sister, Roy has killed both of their parents and Vivian is mad so threatens to kill him if he doesn't give her the entirety of their inheritance. Ernest is Vivian's ex-boyfriend and also Roy Peterson's solicitor. This fact isn't as clear in the film as one of our actors had trouble keeping a straight face for more than five seconds, it took about half an hour to get the final cut when they're in the office as Vivian threatens him (0:26). Unfortunately by the time he managed to get through all his lines, he slightly mispronounced the word "solicitor" so it actually sounds as though he's saying "I'll call my sisters". At that point we had, had enough of trying to get him to be serious so we went with what we had. This did cause some confusion though when asking people their thoughts on Chantage.
The cinematography side of Chantage went extremely well, we were able to produce some really artistic shots. For example, after Ernest has shot Roy, he is panicked and doesn't know what to do with himself (3:06). We used the camera to really highlight this, instead of using a tripod we had a handheld camera that tracked Ernest's movements. This helped to build the tense mood and helped to represent Ernest's emotions and how distraught he was. Another example of a great shot was at 0:35 where there is a cut from the title sequence straight to a close up of Ernest's phone displaying pictures of Vivian. The cut goes from a huge black screen to a magnified object which helped to reinforce the importance of the phone and what was being displayed on it as it was key to the storyline.
The sound was one of Chantage's weakest factors, unfortunately the boom mic that we borrowed from school was faulty which lead to a tonne of unusable footage as it had no sound to accompany it. After adjusting the boom mic we were able to get it to work, however what we didn't realise at the time was that when inside the microphone made a horrible buzzing noise that was permanently layered onto more of our inside footage. We tried to reduce the buzzing noise using the sound adjustment settings in final cut pro, however it didn't work and the buzzing was still a disruption which then lead to us having to re-film for the third time. However, because of this we were able to film in a different location that looked much more like a professional office and also enabled us to re-evaluate the script and make some adjustments to make it even more powerful and effective. So, in this case having a faulty boom mic actually led to a better scripted and better located scene.
Chantage is very busy, it's one of those films that you have to pay attention to at all times in the film otherwise you'll miss something that was really important and without it the film wouldn't make any sense whatsoever. This is because of the 5 minute time limit that we had been set. If I was to re-do this project I would definitely write the story in order to fit into the 5 minutes perfectly, allowing a smooth flow of scenes and a story that was much less confusing and hard to understand.
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