Commentary on "Where's My Money ?"

Chris Langford

Where’s My Money? Commentary

The main topic of our film is that Glen goes to pick up the money that is owed to them by Elsie, but a robber (Chris) comes in the room after Elsie has handed Glen the money. He shoots Glen and then shoots Elsie.

The steps taken to completing this film were quite long even though the film was so short. The first thing we did was write a script with description of dialogue, camera shots and movement. We then went on to creating a rough storyboard and then a final storyboard using photos from our digital camera. We then arranged places to film and actors if needed. We arranged a day and filmed the film. After we all sat around a PC doing the editing and finally uploaded it to Youtube and our Bloggs.

I think that mostly our finalised version of our film went very smoothly, but when actually filming there was quite a lot of problems. We also had to re-edit several times just to make small changes. The problems we had mostly was to do with getting the camera where we wanted it and keep it looking professional and running smoothly, for instance in a panning shot it would be difficult to make the camera stay exactly still and turn smoothly. We recognised this problem and took several of each shot to make sure when it came to editing we had a range to choose from which worked out very well. To ensure the most professional outcome of filming, when filming we always used a tripod to make the camera as steady as possible. This proved very useful and the tripod was very moveable in most areas accept in keeping the camera up right as it screwed in quite loosely.

The editing problems mostly were to do with the software that we were very unfamiliar with. I had experience in windows movie maker therefore catching onto the software fairly quickly but still kept noticing new things a lot of the time.

We used a lot of mísé én scéne and semiotics in our piece because we had such a small amount of dialog. For instance when Glen came in the room and we did an extreme close up it creates tension because you can tell that he is scanning the room but also the viewer cant see anything going on around Glen. The gun also denotes violence or criminal activity, the meeting already looks dodgy because you can tell how suspicious Glen is and then with the robbery of a large amount of money and a gun, it may be interpreted as rival gang crime. There was an un-intentional bit when Glen is walking into the room where the viewer has no idea that another person is there and suddenly we see Elsie after Glen has sat down. I think that we could have used semiotics to show that there was another person in the room. Something which is un-professional but I think worked very well none the less was the background noise when Glen was walking up the ramp to the door. It sounded very much like a factory or a working business environment which set the scene a lot as this small story really was about business between two people.