Preliminary exercise evaluation:

While working in a group, our initial thoughts of a film that includes exchanging dialogues and sitting on a chair opposite of another character would easily spring to mind of an interrogation plot film, and that's exactly the idea we went with. Our brief plot consists of a company scientist that is minding his own business, but what we don't know is that his past history has affiliations with gang members, and it has ultimately caused a stir. 

Regarding the criteria, dialogue obviously didn't have anything specific to be aimed towards, so the script was an easy area to work on. However the shotlist and storyboard came in more useful as it helped organize and break each scene into detailed segments. 

My role in the group was to plan out the shotlist and edit the film. Our strengths in our film I think was the lighting - using a darkly lit room for a silhouette effect was very conventional and fitting for a mysterious interrogator. More conveniently was also the well ventilated area, allowing no static or any other disturbances of sounds that a microphone can easily pick up. Shots wise, we came up with a number of different camera angles, from side, to front, to back. We also used an over-the-shoulder shot which allowed us to do lots of reverse shots from different angles. Editing wise, non-diegtic sounds of a somewhat happy music that you wouldn't normally associate in an interrogation film was used, just to create a juxtaposition, a sudden strong contrast as a kidnap interrogation is probably not what the audience were expecting. The colour correction used was also supporting this effect as it was very bright in the beginning, but once the kidnap scene had started a very dark, greenish colour would be instead applied. Effects such as the shakes and distortions made were used to suture the audience while viewing a POV shot to ultimately make as if the audience was the victim himself. In addition too, the dialogue sounds were modified to create a more muffled and deep sound in order to again, make it more mysterious for the antagonist. We were also able to wrap up the production in a very short amount of time - about 45 minutes to record and 30 mins to edit, however the short time did kind of reflect its finished quality.

Our weaknesses as said shortly before were primarily from lack of organisation and communication it seems. People were needed in inconvenient times and this ultimately forced us to rush the whole production, and also because it underwent during lesson times, some rooms that we initially wanted were in use. I also personally think that the dialogue and acting needed improvement on my behalf as in my eyes it sort of let down the ending and the climax of suspense. Another thing to add while in production is to also not expect literally what you see in the preview playback, a problem we faced was that in the preview, lights were completely in level, not too dark or not too light, but when it actually came to editing the video, it turned out to be way darker and didn't define the silhouette effect much.