Brassic

This was my short film project at the end of my first year at Totton College. This was just to follow a simple brief to make a short film based on a subject that interests you, the subject I decided to focus on was unemployment and follow the idea of the law of unintended consequences to structure the film's narrative. I wrote, directed, edited and starred in the film, I was inspired by David Fincher's Fight Club and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver for the style of the film. Using the ideas of the protagonists in both films being affected by the same problem, their job, and created a character who becomes mentally unstable for similar reasons; the difference being the reliance on his job rather than detesting it. I based the style for the film off them as well, the low-key lighting and some of the shot compositions, to make it look different though I used a colour scheme to match the protagonist's emotions in the shots, when he's on a high the shot is colourful but he's feeling down it's practically black and white, or at the very least dull in terms of colours.

Filming only lasted two weeks and most of the shots I was able to film by myself, these were pretty much all of the montage shots, all the others were filmed by helpers under my supervision on how the shot should look. There were no real problems during filming. Editing lasted around a month, unlike previous projects I was able to experiement with filters and recorded some of the sound effects rather than using pre-recored ones ripped from the internet. Just like for the horror film, Ted, I added a soundtrack to one part of the film, from the Battlestar Galactica Season 2 OST, where I felt added to the scene where there was completely no dialogue, throughout the entire film. I originally going to use another piece from the soundtrack to go over the montage scene but it didn't fit the style I was going for so instead elected to record a beat to go over the top; which consisted of me recording myself tapping a wooden table to the beat of the changes of the pictures in the montage. Editing finished at the end of June, roughly eight weeks after the film went from planning stages into a completed film.

That was the last key project for BTEC Media Production coursework for the first year at Totton College, but that wasn't the last project of the year however.