British Youth- Evaluation

Completing the British Youth topic brought many challenges. Overall, though, I’m happy with
the two final productions I turned in. I think the main strengths of both of my productions overall
was the editing, not because I think it is professional level, but I had never done any serious
editing before, and I think I picked it up very quickly and managed to edit well under serious
time restrictions due to the many delays we experienced.
I'm also particularly happy with how the short film turned out, as one of our actors was absent
for a week during the planning phase, which made communication difficult, and the on the day
of filming one of the main actors wasn’t in and he was meant to have vital props for the
production, meaning on the day we were meant to complete filming I had to change the entire
plot, redo the storyboard and write a new script. We got to my house to film, and we were
struggling with motivation for the first ten minutes or so, but once we got some ideas and began
filming the process became more enjoyable and natural. We then got the bus back to college and
arrived at about 3:30, and I spent the next hour putting together a rough edit. I then got home and
finished the editing, and I was very happy with the editing and script as the genre of comedy is
quite difficult to pull off, but I've received a lot of positive feedback on my school Instagram and
from people who have been shown the film.
This whole process was very challenging, and I think in future the main points of improvement
would be coordinating my team better and planning for time more efficiently as everything was
very last minute.
The documentary was easier in some ways and harder in others. One the one hand, there was less
physical filming and location recces etc. to do, but on the other hand the genre didn’t allow for
too much creativity which definitely made it harder for me to think of ideas and execute them.
The planning was once again difficult, as that is something I’ve always struggled with due to my
ADHD. We decided to do a voiceover on top of relevant clips in the background, and we
recorded the voiceovers a few days before the deadline which didn’t leave much time for
everything else. The voiceovers were then all sent to me and I spent about 12 hours sourcing the
relevant footage and editing the voiceovers as well as various other touches to improve the
production. I was happy with the final product, as the way it was edited was quite easy to follow
in my opinion, but I would’ve liked more time to work on it as I feel it didn’t reach its full
potential due to the time restrictions.