Reflection of my Mexican Standoff Film

This is my reflection essay for my Mexican standoff short film that I

made in week 2.
My idea for my short film was simple, A boy walks into a room and
sees a box of chocolates, he goes to pick them up but then notices
that there is a dog guarding them. The camera zooms in on there
faces to see them look at the box then each other. Suddenly they
both spring for the box and fight over it. Fade to black. Then you see
the dog standing over the body of the boy licking his corpse.
During the start of this unit, we had to go on lockdown, so most
people had to film and act in their films themselves. Luckly my mum
was free to help, having someone else holding the camera made the
whole film a lot better because I could get better angles of what I
was doing as well as my dog. For example, the extreme close up of
my face could not have been shot at all without someone else’s help.
This really made me appreciate teamwork which is what I took for
granted before. The main problem I ran into was keeping my dog
still, luckily, he’s well trained but I learned a valuable lesson about
how using animals can force you to do more takes therefore making
the entire filming process longer. Another problem I ran into was
because we were not in college, I didn’t have access to Premiere pro,
this means I was forced to learn a whole new software. I’m actually
happy this happened because knowing how to use multiple pieces of
software is a very helpful. It took longer to edit but after watching
some videos on the software I figured it out.
If I were to film my film again, I would change a few things, mainly I
would add more shots of the actual box of chocolates so the viewer
can see what both characters are after. I would also change the
music to have some ambient noise at the end. I feel like this would
work better than the music.
Reflection of my Mexican Standoff Film
Overall, I feel like my film met the criteria, it included a Mexican
standoff with a range of different shot sizes. The main thing I would
take away from this is that having a team is crucial. I could not of
produced my work at the level it is without help.