Captive

I was planning on showing another video, but unfortunately the web page isn't working. Hopefully it will be fixed by next month though so I can show you it then. In the mean time here is what I class as my first unofficial short film (up until now they have just been practice).



This film is actually based on a poem that I read years ago. When I was trying to think of a short film idea to make for my A-Level film, I wrote down a few random bits of ideas and one of them reminded me of a poem that I read some time ago. So I decided to combine the piece of idea that I had with the basic story that the poem tells and thus Captive was born.

I then searched for some music that I thought would fit well with the story. The two tracks that I use in the film are from Black Hawk Down. The first track is called "Hunger" and the second is "Ashes To Ashes". Neither of them are in their original form, as I re-edited them to fit better. However, when I was still developing my idea I listened to these tracks (although mostly "Hunger") unedited again and again. This once the main source of my inspiration.

I visualised the film in my head whilst listening to the music I had chosen. I then storyboarded out the opening sequence and the end sequence and wrote the voice over.

The next part is where I wish I had a producer because I found that I had to do literally everything. Once I'd picked my actors (who were just some friends that I'd asked) I had to work around their schedule which was very tiresome because my main actor (Tom Law) who is also a musician was doing a lot of gigs so he didn't have a lot of free time in when I could film. This was tough because I had a deadline to meet. But we managed to find one and a half days where we shot the entire film. It involved one very long day and a lot of travelling where we filmed the cliff scenes and the flashback scene. The scenes of him at home were shot on the second day which luckily didn't take too long because we only had a couple of hours.

I put a lot of hard work into this film and I am very happy with the end result. There are of course a few things I would change if I were to do it again. But these are only minor things. And for my first unofficial short film I think it is rather good.