Vita Morsque Evaluation
Jack Blythe
A TV Drama is 'a story that is presented in a dramatic way and explores a range of genres, from soap opera to science-fiction to costume drama'. Whilst we came up with ideas, we identified the fact that our TV Drama must entertain our audience and we must make our storyline dramatic.
Overall, I am
pleased with our TV Drama. We decided to do a re-make of ‘The Blair Witch
Project’ and implement our own touches and techniques. The first thing that we
changed was the colour correction into ‘sepia’ in order to create a more creepy
effect and added sound effects which we downloaded from YouTube; this made it
into more of a drama rather than a documentary. We managed to change this
colour by using the app ‘VideoFX Live’ and using this app we also added an eerie
flickering effect. Using Final Cut Pro, we also made some of the shots into
black and white as the students were shooting their documentary on more than
one camera. Not many transitions were used apart from the occasional fade out
which made it seem more realistic and again emphasise the fact that the
students were making a documentary.
For the majority of our camera shots we used the POV handheld shot in order to make the TV Drama seem more realistic, however we also used some other shots including long shots and close ups using a tripod towards the end after all of the characters were under a trance in order to represent the Witch’s vision.
We were very happy with our actors who we approached after seeing them present their acting skills in the Performing Arts course at college, and we immediately thought that they suited the roles for our TV Drama.
We followed our script and storyboard quite closely during the production of our TV Drama, but we also came up with and implemented ideas that we came up with during the production. Some of the actor’s lines in the script were memorised and spoken but some of them were also improvised in order to make it seem more realistic and un-staged.
We filmed our production in the ‘Paradise Woods’ in Farnham, it was an ideal location as it was very close and easily accessible and was quite big so we had a lot of woods to film in.
For costumes,
we gave Elliott an urban dress style as he acted the part of the cocky and
‘cool’ character including a hoodie, skinny jeans and a snapback. Ross and Mia
were dressed in their normal clothes to make it seem like they students who
intended to simply go into the woods for a day and shoot a documentary on
something they thought was a bit of a joke at first, hence the lack of supplies
and a tent because they had no idea they’d get lost.
If we were to re-make the TV Drama, I would add some more sound effects to make it more jumpy and add some dramatic music in certain parts to build tension.
Overall, I am
very pleased with our production. We played it to other media students to get some feedback on it and they all said they enjoyed it and thought it was very eerie and scary. Lots of people jumped at certain parts, especially the flash-forward towards the beginning.
