Assignment 7 Evaluation

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.