MALIA CRAWFORD

Though it may not seem obvious, it is a true fact that my film partner and I struggled to form an idea that worked for this assignment. It took us the majority of the assessment to come up with a final script and plan for the film. We went through many ideas but found faults in the storyline or didn't have a big enough production budget or equipment to follow through. 

Our idea started with inspiration from a chapter from a Selby book, where Selby's reflection in the mirror grabs him and pulls him into the mirror and jumps it itself. We thought we could make this idea very dark and mysterious where a person finds a mirror in a dark room and is swapped with their reflection. Eventually we decided that the shots and cinematography required to pull off this idea would be too hard to do. 

We then developed an idea about a camera that kills people and it would only be revealed at the end as a plot twist. We worked on this tirelessly and ended up with our final idea of a professional family photographer whose camera he takes photos with traps people inside the camera. However, he isn't aware of this and when it is revealed the families are missing, he suspects his jealous, moody wife of something terrible. 

We made our film true to this storyline, however, when we showed our rough cut of the film to the class, it was brought to our attention that the audience questioned the relevance of the mother and daughter's characters and if it was realistic for the husband to jump to the conclusion that his wife did something to the families. She suggested we remove most of the mother's bits and focus more on the father and his development in the film.

The final result is FOCUS. 

Our shoot spanned over two days and the edit took two weeks. I found it quite a hard project, especially with time management. Our shoot took place right before my partner and I left for a two-week school mission trip to Thailand. Therefore, upon returning, we didn't get back into the swing of the assignment until about a week later, which happened to be a couple weeks prior to the due date. However, we did finish it and we are both extremely happy with the outcome.

I think we should have started our filming and our planning earlier in the assessment period. We should have worked harder to finalise an idea and plan all the pre-production so that it wouldn't be left till the last month. However, saying that, I do believe that this film wouldn't have been easy to form without the many rejected ideas we had before. 

Overall, I'm very happy with our film and I hope to learn from our mistakes and use our knowledge to help with the process of our next assignments.