When planning for the production of our short urban story our group decided to take influence from a multiple number of different urban stories. We decided to use a French themed style conjoined with using themes from Cheunking Express and its Hong Kong style. The disagreements we faced as a group came mostly during the post production stages as we all seemed to have different opinions on the editing style used. However, as a whole, I think we worked well as a team and managed to produce a true representative of an urban story in the time frame given.
When we were out filming, due to the conventions and themes
of an urban story, we decided on using a Coca-Cola can in order to show a
westernised culture; alongside a narrative consisting of our subject, Ellis,
not actually doing anything productive. We attempted to produce a “reverse
dolly” shot, as shown in La Haine, in order to give an extra reference point and
show some technical skill. In order to do this correctly, you must either, zoom
in whilst simultaneously moving the camera backwards or zoom out and
simultaneously move the camera forwards. When we actually attempted this, as we
used a handheld camera style to again reflect La Haine, either way we did this
it wouldn’t work as well as we hoped due to the unstedyness of the camera when
walking; so we ended up using only a small extract from these shots when the
cameraperson was not walking with the camera, just moving their arm. Although
there is still the essence of a reverse dolly shot here, it is not as prominent
as we would have liked.
This was the main problem we faced during our shoot but yet
we still were capable to use part of this in our final feature, which is
something as a group I think we are pleased with. We decided to change our film
in post production to black and white, again to resemble La Haine (which in
fact, using the black and white technique for no apparent reason) yet, I also
think that it adds to the context of our narrative which is very basic where
not much happens; just like the narrative of classic urban stories.