Short films are likely what any new filmmaker will be making for the first portion of their career, and it is perfectly acceptable to want to continue producing them at any point in your filmmaking journey! A good challenge is to set yourself a time limit and attempt to make the most of that time as possible. In this blog, we will be looking back to one of my shortest films, My Map (2022).
Pre-production
When I started my course at Sheffield Hallam University, we wasted no time in getting hands-on with the equipment. Cameras, sound recorders, microphones, as soon as we had been introduced to these new pieces of kit we were sent out into the field… literally. The students were taken to Grindleford, and tasked with making a one-minute short film. It was not an assessed task so there was no formal brief, but the time limit was strongly encouraged.
A group seemed to form via gravity, consisting of me, Elliott Beeton, and Jonny Brown. These two are some of the most talented filmmakers I now know and it’s no coincidence that I have worked with at least one of them (and usually both) on all of my film projects during my time at Sheffield Hallam. From what we heard, other groups were struggling to form and come up with ideas, and this is something that continued to the shooting day itself. Many of the projects seemed more like camera tests than short films as a result of showing up to the location without a plan at all. We wanted to prevent that.
We held pre-production meetings and, as has become standard in my time working with these guys, we each pitched an idea to the group. This is a brilliant way of getting to know each other’s filmmaking interests and seeing where there may be some overlap. My expectation of joining film school was that I would be surrounded by people striving to make ‘edgy’ films for the sake of it, and the idea of making something in that style didn’t appeal to me at all.
My pitch came to me on a walk, and it saw a central protagonist become lost in the fields and woods of Grindleford, and encounter a few brief comedic situations in his journey. It was a very brief premise, which should always be a consideration for a film with a length as short as this. This character would be looking down at a comically large map, harkening back to silent comedy films and their often prop-based gags.
By some strange circumstance, I was then cast as the protagonist in this film, and I sourced the props and costumes for the character before our shoot day.
Production
After a sandwich at a pub restaurant and a quick recap of the equipment setup, we were off! I feel lucky that the majority of my films have been shot in real locations rather than studio settings. Not only does the location add so much character and personality to your film, it also informs decisions at every level of the filmmaking process. Every location brings challenges and possibilities, and being able to explore these on the day is part of the fun of filmmaking. Some of those challenges for this day were the constant dog walkers and hikers that kept wandering into our shots! Now THAT would have broken the effect of this character being lost all alone in the woods.
What was not so fun, however, was the carrying of all of this equipment up and down the paths and hills on the trails in Grindleford! Any wrong step or slip could have injured us, or worse… damaged the equipment. As the actor, I was often on the side of the camera without a preview of what I was doing. This was common for us early in University, as performance students were not accessible to us on shoots like this. It gave me a lot of admiration for actor/directors like Sylvester Stallone, there must be a lot of trust required in your crew members to be able to film something while YOU are the subject. This was the trickiest part of the shoot as it was difficult to co-direct and explain my ideas for shots to people that I didn’t know too well at the time. One of the best things about working with the same crew members time and time again is the relationship that is formed between you. You are more aware of each others’ abilities and you develop a set of references for each other. Now if I want to suggest a shot, I can refer to a previous shot from another film we have worked on, and point out the similarities or differences, and the process of understanding this idea is considerably faster than abstractly explaining it in detail.
I don’t exactly consider acting a skill of mine, but my character was quiet and funny… so it was obviously very easy to slip into that role. I had thoughts of the editing process in my head already, and as a result, I was a bit mischievous. I would often mess up, or do something different on takes to fit the desired outcome for my personal edit of the film. This is NOT something I would recommend doing on larger productions, or if you are an actor only, but luckily it benefitted me in the editing room.
Post-production
When it came to editing, we all edited our own versions of the film using AVID for video editing and Logic Pro for sound design. These were both new pieces of software to me but I was able to get a good enough grasp on them for the completion of this film. I am often very strict about hitting the brief and time frame, and this film was the origin of that practice. Just because we had minutes worth of footage, it did not mean that we should try to force it into the film just because we were proud of it. The film ran just about a minute before the credits appeared, which were not too specific as we shared many of the responsibilities on the film.
I love dissolves. Elliott disagrees with me often about this but I think a dissolve is a very powerful and effective editing technique with a variety of uses. It can often be a softer transition than a hard cut and can be used to hide some slight differences in continuity and framing. It can convey the passage of time, and can also just be quite visually appealing to look at. Dissolves can also have an interesting effect when only one part of the shot changes between the different points or clips that you are dissolving between. For example, as I walk down the path on the hill, I can use dissolves to imply the slow passage of time and have me complete the journey a lot faster. The camera being static allows for this, and the dissolve hides some of the imperfections such as the leaves of trees not aligning perfectly.
Our film was praised for its comedic use of matching sound and images and this was a consideration all throughout the production process. I had cited the banjo/guitar music of Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) as an inspiration for the sound of the film, and this is something I was able to implement through Logic Pro. I am pretty sure it was constructed just from two keys on my keyboard, and I could then use that to establish a pace for the film. The music begins as the hiker starts his journey and synchronises with me appearing from behind a tree, before slowing down at my recognition of the path ahead, and then returning to its standard tempo as I run down it.
We implemented a lot of sound recordings that we collected on the day, specifically water that we recorded with an underwater hydroponic microphone. This plays as the character looks at his map, and begins to think thoughts of being lost and also the spirit of adventure. The only downside to the sound design would be the footsteps. This is a painfully tedious thing to recreate through sound libraries, and we had not yet gained access to a foley studio to record footstep sounds that could synchronise with our footage.
As a whole, I was pleased with the edit and it was received well by all!
Release of Short Film
My cut of the film seemed to become the accepted version and was the one we put forward for feedback. Films this short are difficult to submit to festivals or other screenings. They are so short, yet cost the same price to submit as a film upwards of 40 minutes long! So you are incentivised to save that budget for something longer and with more depth. We did release a bloopers video, which for a time was more viewed than the film it was based on! In it, you get a sense of some of the things I have mentioned in this blog, such as my ‘ruining’ of takes (walking off-screen, which is something I used in the final cut!) and the number of walkers that interrupted our shots.
Maybe the biggest impact of this film is that I was able to send it to Bertram Hardy as part of my audition for the central character in his short film, Killing Time (2023). But that is a story for another time…
Thanks for reading!
Mitchell
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