Reflection

After we saw the brief, the first idea we had was to do a film about an alcoholic who gives up drink. Soon after we started discussing this idea we heard another group talking about how they were going to do a film about someone giving up cigarettes, so we decided to do something different. We soon came up with the idea of a young guy who decides to break up with his boyfriend.

Although we had a clear idea of what we wanted to do and achieve with the film, when it came to post we realised that it wasn't really what we had had in mind at all. We wanted to focus on the character and his emotions and show the difficulty he was going through, but when we started to watch our footage back, we started to realise the film was lacking somewhat. We wanted there to be a connection with the character, so we wanted to just focus on the one character, but I think, really, the film needed more complexity. Most Hollywood films these days can have a very simple, and overall, boring storyline because they can just make up for it with special effects and action sequences to keep the audience gripped and interested in the film. Obviously, with Dogme 95 you can't do that, so you have to make the storyline gripping and interesting, just to keep the audience interested. I don't think we really anticipated how other people outside our project would receive our film, not knowing the back story or what's really going on.

If we filmed another Dogme 95 film, I'd definitely spend more time planning the actual shots, just to make the editing easier. We had a lot of trouble lining uo the shots without it looking odd, due o the lack of consistency with the dialogue. I'd also work on the story of our film, add in more characters, a background story and more of a resolve at the end. Overall, I'm not particularly happy with our film, but have learned a lot about Dogme 95, and learned that making an entertaining Dogme 95 film, such as the one we watched in class, is actually a lot more challenging than what I'd thought.