For my Final Major Production, I chose to create a Short Film that follows the story of a

young character, who aspires to become an astronaut. This dream is quickly damaged when
the character, Harrison Bailey, finds out that he will not achieve this dream due to being
colour blind. I decided that this would be the idea that I would produce, because I feel that
the ideas and themes could relate to a lot of people. There are a lot of different reasons why
people cannot fulfil their dreams, which I found out by sending a survey.

I have completed this production to the best of my ability. I received feedback from my
teachers and peers at different stages of the process. The first portion of feedback I received
was at the very beginning of the unit, when I was coming up with three initial ideas of what I
could create. At the time, this idea was my weakest of the three and my least favoured to
create. However, after speaking to my focus group, I was convinced that this particular idea
could create an innovative short film, and I was given some valuable feedback. I developed
this idea by myself, deciding that my characters fall-back would be down to a disability. I
brought these new ideas, and the developed idea back to the same group of peers for
another focus group, and was given some positive feedback regarding my ideas. Moving on
to research, I sent out focus groups to my target audience, to collect another set of data
containing ideas and opinions on my ideas. Here, I was given a lot of ideas on a number of
factors; including that the production should be set in modern times and could include some
archived footage that shows the character growing up with a love for space. The last set of
feedback I received was when I pitched my idea to my original focus group, with a
PowerPoint that I had to create to show my ideas and explain who I would be making the
production for and why.

I decided to work towards entry to the London Short Film Festival, instead of working with a
client. The London Short Film festival is due to take place between the 5th and 11th
December in Central London this year. My production will be entered on the regular
admission deadline on 15th August, I opted for this because it matched up with my college
deadlines for this production. In the category I would like to enter my production into, there
are six different awards that I can win. There will also be no joint winners for any of these
awards.

The competition that I decided to enter did have a few guidelines that I had to follow in
order to enter my production. The main rule was that the running time of my production
has to be less than 45 minutes, which I am happy to follow. However, I also have some
guidelines that I need to follow, that were set by my college and the exam board. These
extra rules are: no references to drugs, no swearing and no nudity. I was not planning on
adding any of these into my production, so these guidelines are fine for me. Also, only ten
percent of the footage can be downloaded, meaning that everything else must be my own
work. Again, this is something that I am happy to do, as I was only intending on downloading
a soundtrack.

I believe that my production followed the conventions of my chosen genre. My production is

under the genre of
I also do believe that I did my topic justice. Originally, I did have some doubts, as a point was
raised to me that it could come across that the message is to just give up once you fail.
However, after changing the story slightly, I adapted the way that this message could come
across. I did not want to write this story so that my character ends up becoming an
astronaut, due to the fact that it may be simply impossible for some people to fulfil their
dreams, instead, I wanted to get across the message that there are other possible routes
that a person can go down. My character changes his mind and decides that he still wants to
work in the space sector, just taking on a different job role.

I had to develop my characters to suit the story. My character, Harrison Bailey is young, and
has a fascination with NASA, space, and the idea of becoming an astronaut. This particular
character spends a lot of time at home, with his Mum. He also acts younger than his age,
and has a child-like personality to show his desperation to fulfil his dreams. The character
develops through the production, as he realises that he will not become an astronaut,
resulting in choosing a different career path in the same field of work. Angela Bailey,
Harrison’s mother, is another character who helps to progress the story. Angela is a warm
and caring character who shows support for her son throughout. She is there to comfort
Harrison when he is rejected, and offers support. Angela’s character does not develop or
change, she stays constant throughout.

I faced a lot of problems when completing this project. Whilst making the pre-production
booklet, I found the storyboarding to take more time than expected, this is because I do not
enjoy drawing and like to take my time with it. I also faced one major issue just a couple of
days before filming, even though my actors Harrison Olney and Mia Curtis had agreed to
film and take roles in my production, they both pulled out. Harrison Olney told me that he
had decided against helping, as he did not want to miss aspects of his social life, this was
easily solved because he told me that he no longer wanted to participate, so I was able to
contact Billy Gibbs about taking the role. On the other hand, Mia Curtis did not show up on
the day of filming, and did not give a reason once I contacted her. Therefore, I contacted
Keira Anderson and asked for her to help me with my production, which she was willing to
do. The rest of the process was mainly problem-free, only minor stress whilst editing as
some of the work deleted itself, however when editing again, I actually preferred this new
version. I had planned for some problems whilst completing the problem-solving document
at the beginning of the project, and these problems showed me that I cannot plan ahead for
most problems, as most of the time they are unpredictable and cannot be resolved ahead of
time. Fortunately, I was able to manage all of these problems, and they did not affect me
much.

I feel that I have developed my skills in a variety of areas. At the beginning of this year, I
decided that I would focus on directing. I feel that I have worked on this discipline quite a
bit. I was directing Billy Gibbs, who proved to be a very good actor, as he was keen and
willing to do what I asked. I also had to explain what was going to be happening in each
scene before we started recording, and make sure that my actors knew what was going on.
This project has shown me that there is a lot to being a director, I had to ensure that I was
listened to and my instructions were clear. I had also said that one of the things that I
wanted to work on and improve was the camera angles and movements. In this production,
I did use a variety of camera angles, trying to get creative with what I could portray. An
example of this would be the high angle shot over Billy Gibbs whilst he lay in bed. This shot
type was able to give the viewers a view over Billy’s character as he woke up, making it
obvious at the point he woke up. This skill development will help me in a few ways. Firstly,
as I am going to study Film and Television production as university, I will be able to develop
these skills even more one there, and I will already have knowledge and understanding. The
directing skills will also help me in the future, as I will be able to take control of projects and
briefs whilst on the university course, however, I feel that some of these skills will be useful
in life as well.

When researching and planning my production, I looked at a couple of different examples. I

watched some other productions, to get an idea of the camera angles and shot types they
used, along with the way that they set the scene. First of all, I watched

Next time, I would do a couple of things differently for my production. Originally, I had the
idea to create an opening sequence of ‘archived footage’ to show the character growing up
with a love for space. I feel that if I had started planning this sequence earlier, I would have
been able to find a younger child to play this role. I would like to see how this would have
turned out because I feel that this was a good idea. I also feel that I could have made the
character’s colour blindness more obvious, as it is only mentioned whilst filling out the
application form. Even though I did have my character wearing glasses, which confirms this,
I believe that I could have added this from earlier on to make it more realistic. As for the
planning and research portion of this project, I feel that I should have been more organised
and completed my research in a more organised and structured way, to get it done quicker.
This would have left me more time to film my production, as I would have more time. I am
very happy with a lot of my production.