Assignment 7 Evaluation
The Purpose of a Television
Drama
Television dramas are mainly created to
reflect the lives of their intended target audience and the content will mostly
be naturalistic realism and can relate to real life situations, meaning that
the audience are led to believe what they see on-screen. However, with our
television drama, we incorporated a real life situation (a college environment)
and we merged it with a supernatural unaturalistic situation (zombies being
part of that college environment).
The Original Idea
Our original idea still involved zombies
getting involved with humans, but we based our original idea on a human
apocalypse. It was going to start off with a zombie family eating dinner, then
there would be a black out. The next shot would be of one family member waking
up to find other family members dead and one member missing. The remaining
zombie would go on a hunt outside to try and find the missing family member
where they would encounter humans that are revolting against the human
apocalypse. These humans were going to help the zombie find its missing family
member.
Why We Didn't Stick With
That Idea
To fulfil this idea, we needed lots of
actors for the chase scene and it was very difficult to find willing actors to
run for us because they all needed to be able to get to our filming location
and they needed to be able to get there for the same time to film. All of our
actors were college students, meaning that they all had different free periods.
This made it difficult to film because we didn't have enough actors at any one
time. Another reason why we didn't stick with this idea was because for the
family scene, we needed a location that would allow us to splatter paint and
ketchup all over the floor and walls.
How The Television Drama
Was Created, Filmed and Edited
We
decided to base our television drama around zombies because lots of people are
interested in zombie television programmes and films, so we thought that this
would appeal to a wider audience. Sophie created a mind map of all our ideas
around the basis of zombies. Once we decided to incorporate zombies and a human
apocalypse, Sophie created a storyboard and I created the script. We worked
together when creating both of these so that they matched up. However, during
the process of filling out all the paperwork, our group realised that it would
be difficult to stick with our original idea halfway through filming (see
paragraph above) because certain things would be difficult to film and
consequently we wouldn't be able to fulfil our television drama idea. Myself
and Dan took on the role of cameramen, meaning that we were in charge of
following the storyboard and script to make sure that we had correct and
accurate shots. Sarah-Beth and Dan edited our footage and Sophie participated as
an actor (one of the zombies) in our television drama.
Strengths and Weaknesses
One strength of our television drama was
that we got all the pre-production paperwork sorted within the first couple of
weeks of being handed the assignment. This meant that we had more time to film
our television drama incase anything went wrong such as actors not turning up
or people forgetting their costumes. Another strength was that once we had
decided what we were going to base our television drama on, we needed to gather
together all the equipment we would use. This involved getting a HD television
camera, a tripod and getting the makeup together that would be used to create
the look of a zombie. We were able to gather all this equipment up quickly so
that we wouldn't struggle finding it all at a later date.
Although we had some strengths within our
group, there were also some weaknesses exposed throughout the course of
filming. One particular weakness was after we decided to not use our original
idea, we were stuck on what to film. We knew that we still wanted to base our
television drama on zombies but we were uncertain on how to portray them. The
process of deciding on what to film instead could’ve been quicker, giving us
more time to do the paperwork thoroughly. Another weakness within the group was
communication. Whilst filling out the paperwork we didn’t really communicate
with each other to make sure we were all on the same page with explaining our
ideas. This lead to a couple of tasks being redone because the information
being given was not correct and accurate. If we could re-do our single camera
television drama, the communication within the group would have to be improved
so that we don’t get confused. Another thing we could improve on if we did the
filming again would be to organise our actors more effectively to save us from
having to change our original idea in the first place.
