1) Outline briefly how your approach to your current production work differs from your experience of pre-production work at AS?

This year the entire process of pre-production work has been a lot easier and quite frankly gone a lot quicker. During my AS the main bulk of preproduction work was learning how to use all of the soft wear that would be needed during the production process, we also had to gauge and acute knowledge of genre and the basics of film making. This year I seem to have got to the point a lot quicker,of course I've had to go over some of the things I learnt last year however creating a short film is far more vast than just creating an opening. Because of this my research into other short films has been far more extensive, I've tried to watch as many as possible so that I can get some inspiration and see the varying ways that directors have set out their own films. When it comes down to general planning, such as story boarding and mind mapping i've tried to do so in much more detail. This year I feel like I know pretty much what I need to do to achieve something i'm proud of, whereas last year I was a little lost.

2. What decisions have you made about the narrative structure of your short film? How has your thinking about narrative moved on since year 12?

The structure of my narrative is going to be fairly linear, however not in a traditional way. Because i'm not really using speech and not having a deep interaction with one character my plot isnt really a clear 'beginning, middle, end' type narrative. It just flows. Last year I think I got a bit carried away, I used flash backs to add some difference into my film opening. As a technique I think its a really good idea when done properly, however on reflection it made my opening look more like a montage sequence. Because I used clips of flash back quite often it detracted from my actual message and I think the audience may have got a little confused as to what was the real story that they were supposed to be following. My excuse at the time was that the point of a film opening is to evoke intrigue... I've learnt my lesson now.

3. To what extent could the short film be considered a discrete genre?

During AS I did a lot of research in to genre and my preferred genre was always drama, because I love watching things that have a real sense of reality about them. My last years work was within the drama genre looking into the relationship between a mother and daughter. So this year again I was hoping to create something within that same genre. I did a lot of research into surrealism at the beginning of this years work and I loved how surrealist work is basically all heightened reality. Surrealist practitioners such as Bunel or Dali take a social issue and warp it making it completely absurd. I really liked that premise, however I knew that a lot of people in my class are looking into surrealism, so I wanted to stray away and find a niche of my own. I could say that perhaps my film is of a discrete genre because I almost want it to have a feel of a kind of documentary style, but I don't want it to be real. I want it to be a drama. So perhaps at this stage of the development it is a discrete genre.