"A Chance Encounter" Film Production

"A Chance Encounter" 

For our next small project, we had to develop a silent film that somehow related back to the title “A Chance Encounter”. My group came up with the idea of having a close encounter with death. We first thought about the many superstitious things that could happen to our main character, before his run in with death. However, we found it hard to add superstitions into the video when it came to the production, as we couldn’t get objects like ladders to walk under and broken mirrors. In the end, we only had a calendar that labelled the date to be Friday the 13^th. Our film showed the main character walking from work, being followed by death (who turned out to be dressed in a red robe, as no one had a black one). On leaving work, he was almost run over by death (this being the close encounter) before he recovered and walked further to reach his car, where he was eventually caught by death. 

Pre-Production 

We focused a lot of the pre-production aspect during this project. We created a storyboard (which illustrated the different scenes), a script (which outlined in detail the events that would happen during each scene) and a treatment (which showed a description of the film, outlining the plot and everyone’s roles). The pre-production really helped us when it came to the actual making of the film, especially since we only had a few hours to film the entire thing. Because we had planned our scenes, we knew where we should be going and what should take place. I think if we hadn’t planned this beforehand it would have taken us twice the amount of the time to film.

Good and bad

I thought that the narrative of our film worked well, as it flowed smoothly from one scene to the other and wasn’t hard to understand. However, we could have focused more on different styles of shots to add interest to our filming. I also felt that we worked well as a team. Everyone had an allocated role and we managed to get everything finished quickly and easily due to this.

We received feedback that there was too much walking during our film, which I agreed with when I watched it back with the rest of the class. During our production, the walking scenes didn’t seem as long. If we were able to edit our film, we would have obviously cut these scenes, making them shorter. This was one of the real difficulties with not being able to edit our video afterwards.