One Minute Film + Evaluation

One Minute Film Project: Mean Girls

In this project, we were put into random groups of 3-4 people (I was grouped with Phoebe and Au), we then could choose what kind of film we want to create but it had to be under a minute. 

It took us quite a long time to come up with what film we would like to re-create in one minute, but we finally settled with the classic choice, Mean Girls!

Lesson 1
Since we wasted some time before settling with Mean Girls, some other groups were already ahead of us in terms of filming and scripting. Mean Girls is set in a high school so we didn't need a lot of props. In terms of how to sequenced the plot and scenes, we took inspiration from a video on Youtube.

In this lesson, we planned each scene based on this video, we also searched up the popular Mean Girls quotes to pull out the iconic ones to use in our video,
This was how we planned it:

We also asked some of our classmates to help out as we did not have enough cast. We had time left from this so we decided to shoot the first scene. 

THE FIRST SCENE:

We only needed Phoebe the cross the road so no additional cast members were needed. We headed outside of the sixth form building to the back of the school area behind the dining hall and filmed at the cross road. We wanted to go for that awkward 'far-away' shot of Phoebe crossing the road.

We also tried to create a parallel with the real movie by adding in the part where Lindsay Lohan's character was almost hit by a bus, there were no cars passing by so we used a gardener who was biking past. 

This was my first time operatating the camera, it was easy enough to use but we struggled with how to get it to record at first. This scene was zoomed in a bit but it was a wide shot.

Lesson 2

We decided to film all the parts without the Plastics since those scenes required some people who were unavailable. The quickly got right to it so we actually got a lot of work done in this lesson. We also changed some of the casts around and Allen (who had free period at the time) helped play a small part, which was really helpful!

THE SECOND SCENE

We went out to the grass area in the sixth form building so it looked like the real scene in Mean Girls. We wanted to keep the dialogue short and snappy like in the video we took inispiration from. 

I operated the camera again for the scenes we filmed in this lesson since I was the only one who wasn't in any of the scenes. It was quite a challenge because the lighting sometimes washed out the people in the scene and a lot of times it was out of focus. We alternated between full shots (of all three characters), close-ups of each character (when they were introduced) and also manually moving the camera when the characters are having a conversation. 

Lesson 3

This lesson wasn't as productive but we did film a scene of Regina and the teacher. We also made a burn book by printing the cover and sticking it onto a notebook. We realised that we couldn't shoot as many scenes as we would like as it would go over the time limit. Au and Phoebe went to film the riot scene (which we didn't end up using) while I put some clips together (basic cutting and sequencing).

Lesson 4 

This lesson was really rushed as at that point we only had half of the all the scenes and we have not started any editing at all. I bought in some props (pink clothes, hair accessories, lip gloss) and Phoebe bought in a wig (we also borrowed Saranya's purple wig). We filmed all the Plastics scenes here.

We managed to wrap everything up by the end of lesson 4... 

Editing

Phoebe and I stayed up to sequence and cut all the clips after school, we also filmed some of the parts that we forgot to film during the lessons and put them in, all this took about 2 hours. Phoebe took the computer home to edit more and it turned out really good! :) 

I especially like the opening scene where the text 'Mean Girls' kind of followed the guy riding the bike into the scene, I thought it went really well with the whole 'quirky' theme that we were going for. I also thought the hashtags were really creative and saved us a lot of time and dialogue. 

The music choice were already part of the real movie so that fit in quite well already.

Camera

This project is the first time that I worked on a camera like the one we used. I found that it is really easy to use and the quality is really good as well. Some scenes (scene 2) was kind of frustrating because of how we needed to constantly change the tripod level. Also, when I first started I didn't know how to change the focus so some scenes were out of focus. :(

FINAL PRODUCT

Evaluation

-It was really funny.

-It was edited really well. 

-It was shot relatively well :)

-We stayed pretty close to the video and also the real movie.

-TIME was our biggest issue. By the forth lesson, we were really rushed and even forgot to film some scenes or say some of the important dialogue. When Phoebe and I were editing afterschool, a lot didn't make sense and we had to go back alone to film some. Fortunately these were only the close-up scenes but it could have turned out really bad if other cast members were needed in those scenes. Next time I will try to organize my time more effectively and also make decisions faster(?)

- USE MICROPHONE! The audio turned out really horrible and in hindsight we should have used audio equipments.

-Confusing plot: in the peer evaluation post-it thing, a lot of people were complaining that the plot was difficult to understand. Since time limit was a problem, we couldn't put in a lot of scenes that explained some parts- this could make our video seem really confusing if you've never watched Mean Girls before. Again, we also didn't have a lot of time and rushed it so this could be the reason for the really confusing ending as well.

-Shaky and out of focus camera. These were mistakes made because we weren't familiar with the cameras yet. 

Evaluation by other students: