Drama Evaluation

Our drama film was based around a mother who has gone through domestic abuse and is now suffering from PTSD. We wanted to display her traumatic experience by using flashbacks both visual and audio such as at the beginning of the film where there’s a shot of the door with a shadowy figure standing there and moves away. This straight away encourages intrigue from the audience, making them want to know who exactly this person is and what they look like. Cool blue colour grading has been used one some parts of the scene where the actress is seen to clearly illustrate the mood she has as blue has a negative connotation of sadness. We initially struggled on getting an actress to play the mother, but this was quickly resolved because we were lucky enough to have my flat mate play as the mother as she looked mature enough to play her. Our teamwork has been great especially equipment wise. A lot of equipment had to be booked out and we equally distributed them all carrying it to the location we were going to film which took at least an hour. Fortunately, we were lucky enough to get an uber back after filming taking our equipment back thanks to Cameron. Cameron also had an idea for us all to join an app called “Discord” which is a chat room for gamers which is designed for them to talk to each other in real time. This can also be done with groups. This was great idea because within the app there’s also different rooms which are allocated specifically for our roles. This was a good opportunity to sort out all our planning such as story boarding, script and shooting arrangements. This was better than Facebook group chat as it contained more features suited for this project such as the separate rooms. We also have the option to talk verbally in real time on the app to talk about the film. The first strength I would say about our film is the strong element of sound design which is shown through the voices of both characters, one having a much stronger, deeper tone to display dominance and the other being soft to illustrate a submissive behaviour. The sound of the ticking which is prevalent throughout the film is a reference from Dunkirk (2017) directed by Christopher Nolan. The dynamic range of sound is a strength too as the sound of the ticking can go from quiet to loud.  The Dark Knight (2008) is also another reference used by including the desaturated colours within our film and some close-ups of faces which can be seen in The Dark Knight film. One thing that could be done differently is to make it a little bit longer to carry on the tension and the story. Another thing that could be done differently is to make the abuser visible but we thought that by hiding his face, it would make it more sinister and let’s the audience create their own image.