During her short film production assignment, Ashleigh worked with a group to plan and begin filming a psychological thriller. However, two group members left, forcing Ashleigh and the remaining member to join a new group. This caused some disruption as they had to adapt their plans. Ashleigh found editing the hardest part due to her inexperience, but gained skills over time. While some difficulties occurred due to changing groups and actor availability, Ashleigh was pleased with her pre-production work and the group's organized production schedule of filming on weekends and editing during lessons.

1. Ashleigh Darlington IG3 Short Film Evaluation
IG3 Short Film Production and Post-Production Assignment Evaluation
During the first stage of this project, I decided who I would be working with;it was me
and three other people, Charlotte, Zoe and Billie. Once we were in a group we
established a company name for ourselves, ABC’Z. In our first meeting after
compromising and taking everyone’s ideas into perspective we decided that we would
create a psychological thriller that told the story of a young innocent child and a
disturbed man who once meant everything to her. Once we had our initial idea we then
went on to pre-production, in this we started to develop it on our own, each making our
own mood boards. I made two mood boards one that followed the type of genre that we
had chosen where I involved images of objects, locations and characters that would be
in our film and one that was a completely different genre, which was Romance. The
reason I did another mood board of a different genre was to show my understanding for
other genres, to show that I knew about others and not just the genre of my film.
After I had done these and blogged these I began writing my film proposal and
treatment. I struggled mainly with the treatment, I found it very difficult and I wrote
three before I finally had one I decided I could use, this was because with the others I
either gave too much of the story away or didn’t make it sound interesting enough, but I
am now happy with how it ended up turning out and think if I was to read that then I
would definitely want to see the film myselfwhereas before I wouldn’t have. We then
each began writing our script then we all came together and chose the best one however
we discussed what parts we thought was good out of each other’s and took certain parts
from them and put them into the chosen one. We then wrote another one which was the
final script. Just after this had been done two members of the group decided to leave the
college so it was just me and Charlotte left and we wouldn’t be able to carry out the
whole process with just the two of us. So we ended up both joining another group,
named Steampunk Productions. This group had each wrote out their own scripts and
chosen the one they would go on to use but they was just at the stage of deciding what
they were going to add to it, so me and Charlotte added our own ideas to the script
when we was re-writing it, to ensure that everyone was involved.
Due to the change of group and no longer being able to do the film we had planned to do
most of the pre-production is for the other film that we had planned to do originally. So
other than the problems that occurred because of people leaving caused a little bit of
confusion as we then had to go into another group and start doing a completely
different film. A good point was that our film was a psychological thriller/horror which
is the same as it is now. Overall I found the pre-production work the easiest out of
everything else and I think it was all done to best standard I could produce so there’s
nothing I would change for that.
When it came to the production itself, once we came back after the summer break we
got straight into the filming, we only needed two actors in our film. For the locations we
would only need a house for most of the scenes and then the other scenes was outside

2. Ashleigh Darlington IG3 Short Film Evaluation
so we chose to do it at our directors house and use two of his friends, however problems
started occurring when one of the actresses only came once and every other time that
we scheduled to do it again they could never make it due to illnesses and family
emergencies. At first we found ways to go around this by just filming the scenes that
only involved the other actress, however once this was done and the only scenes left
involved the other actress, she still wasn’t able to make it so we decided to make our
other production runner Carrie the actress instead and the first day we got more done
with our new actress than we ever had with the old one, so this change definitely paid
off. However I would say that the fact we chose to use actresses that weren’t in our
group or college caused problems and became a weakness at times.
Our plans were to film at the weekends and then edit in our lessons during the week
and we stuck by this throughout the whole project. This proved to be very successful
and was definitely one of our group strengths as this led us to know where we was up to
at the end of every week and no what we needed and as this was something every
member of our group did it made us all near enough up to the same stage as each other
all the time.
Out of everything we did for IG3 I would say that I found editing the hardest and that
was my weakness and where I struggled the most as at first I was completely unaware
of how to use it, however Iain gave us a brief demonstration and he also gave us a short
editing task to help us familiarise ourselves with the software which was Adobe Premier
Pro and then once we had this we began doing our first draft edit and then turned that
into our final edit. I think if I was to do this whole assignment again I would only change
what I did during the editing process as I was happy with everything else apart from
this, although I did try my hardest and think at this current time that is the best I can
produce, I think if I had a lot more practice and time then it could be a lot better and I
would then be happy with the final outcome.
I also found the editing harder because we had chosen to have dialogue throughout our
film and ambient sound rather than putting a soundtrack to it. I found this harder
because we had to edit each scene to how we wanted it. Then we listened to all the
sound clips that we had, this sometimes took a long time as there was lots of sound clips
and some of them didn’t even have any sound on them at all and then after doing that
we had to place them on the timeline on Adobe Premier Pro underneath the scene and
try to synchronise the shot and the audio together so that it all fit, this was something I
didn’t look forward to the most. However most of the time I put the audio underneath it,
it was near enough already synchronised anyway without me having to do much.
I would like to make a short film again, but if I did there would be quite a few things I
would change such as; I would choose to put a soundtrack over the film instead of our
choice to do ambient sound, I would also try and pick actors and actresses that are in
the group that I am working in. Although there are things that I want to change, I was
still happy with quite a lot of things I did and there are things I would want to keep the

3. Ashleigh Darlington IG3 Short Film Evaluation
same such as; the order we did our work in, in terms of doing the filming at the
weekend and then the editing throughout the week during our lessons.