Evaluation

At thestart of this year i came up with an idea for this project and it was an episode based zombie surival show. I had come up with an idea from reading the walking dead graphic novel's and it was going to based around 3 main characters set in plymouth. I had the basic layout for the first episode but by the time we had sone are first shoot the walking dead had just came out so we decided to completely changed the idea to a zombie mockumentary looking at how zombies would intergrate them into society.

For this project i intended to work out of my comfort zone and work as director and co-writer as in the last couple of month's i have been edging more towards directing side of productions. For this project i got a lot of influences from a lot a different people, films and documentaries but my main influence came from Kevin Smith who has written and directed a lot of feature films such as Red State, Jay and Silent Bob strike back, Dogma and Mae Day which is a documentary. A lot of his films i feel have inspried my work over this year  but i think Mae Day was the biggest insprstion on this mockumentary. Kevin Smith was in a similar position to me as he was filming a documentary that went wrong and he had to make the most of what he had, after watching this( but before we had such bad luck on are project) i felt a bit more reassured about doing a mockumentary because i felt that we would have full control of it but it turned out we didnt. Another reason why he influences this peace of work was the humour he uses in his films as not everyone gets it and he always split the auidence which i feel is something that this mockumentary might do. From doing this project i hoped that i would have a better understanding of how to direct actors, learn what goes into making a good mockumentary and what it takes to write a script for a mockumentary.

To say that there were a few critical incidents that happen on this project would be a understatementas on every shoot apart from one we had problems. The main incidents were to do with actors and extras as on every shoot actors and extras never showed up and never give us notice which left us as a group to try and find actors and extras to fill in at last minute. After the first shoot we were let down by dancers but on that shoot we were able to film some of the scene, but still felt fairly confident that the mockumentary would still work and be ok and this was just a little incident at the time, but then it started happening on every shoot and started to shape the mockumentary into something i didn't play it to be. This is when maybe i should have put a stop to the production and put it on hold but we decided to carry on as we had already scraped one project idea. Another problem we faced was are make up artist was only available on sundays which really limited are selfs on shooting. We had always aimed throughout the production to make it look like a student DSLR style of mockumentary, as we are playing our selfs in the mockumentary and i feel we achieved this.

For all the bad luck we have had on days of shoot's and being let down by actors at every point i feel that we have made the best of what we had to work with. The mockumentary its self wasn't what i expected it to be and if it wasn't for the student hand in i never would have filmed the mockumentary the way we had but it wasn't all doom and gloom i am taking some really positive points away with me from doing this production but i can also see that this project as a whole has some real potential and i might revisit this production in the future and start from scratch. The main strengthsto this production were how well we all worked as a group and thinking quick on our feet when problems were presented to us, because we all knew the script so well, the shoots were really easy for us as a group to set up and the crew knew what there jobs were and was able to get on with it and i was able to communicate to the actors the ideas of what had to go on in the scene. There were i think two main weaknesses to this project and they were the actors letting us down and having to get friends and family to act instead and there was a little weakness in the make up and that was more our fault as a group more than staceys and that was the attention to detail with the make up as in some scenes with the zombies, they dont have full make up in terms of there were bits of the zombies bodies didnt look like zombie bits and i think this is because we were focusing on what the face make up looks like and missing bits. If we had a chance to redo this project there are defiantly things i would do differently and they are paying actors so you get the commitment of then and have a make up artist that can do more then sunday shoots so we would have more time for shoots. I found out that in mockumentarys it is hard to write comedy that most people will laugh at as everyone finds different things funny and how you really dont have as much control over everything as i would have wished. The film itself isn't what i expected it to be when we came up with the idea but i think we have made the best mockumentary we could have done with all the problems we faced.

After screening to our peers and lectures, I'm a lot happier withthe mockumentary as a whole and i can see that this mockumentary has a lot a potential to it still. We as a group have taken everything the peers and lecture said about are mockumentary and have started applying then and re-editing the mockumentary.