Deconstruction and Reconstruction of a media text

Deconstruction and Reconstruction of a media text

Within temptation – Sinead short film

 

Our deconstruction and reconstruction task, we chose to do a short film which we tried to reconstruct thirty seconds of. The short film was called ‘Within Temptation – Sinead’. The main obstacles which prevented us for producing a master piece were lighting and location. The segment was from 1:17 till 1:47 of the short film.

Costumes were a key feature in our reconstruction and they were pretty easy to snap up, as they was average clothing from everyday use such as the white vest or a casual jumper. We did actually encounter a couple of problems with clothing which interrupt our shooting schedule. The reason this happened was because we need a specific jumper to have this realism and continuity editing, but our actor kept forgetting the jumper giving us a negative knock on effect and delaying us from shooting. The non-diegetic music we used wasn’t the exact duplicate from the original film but it was pretty close which I thought fitted in quite well; also we picked up diegetic sound from the camera which fitted in quite well and was very pleasing.

Back to the lighting issue, this punished our continuity editing, in our closing scenes the light is turned on but then in the next one it is off. This was due to different location shooting. This was a big mistake and when we went on to editing and realised this mistake, we didn’t have enough time to go back and reshoot it.

Problems kept on popping up for us, in our shooting of the short film such as the sequence of the women going through the cupboards, we made another mistake as we shoot using two different cupboards, this again showed lack of continuity. As a team we tried to resolve this problem, as we was editing we flipped the so it looked like a replica to the same cupboard and when we showed our final product to the class, nobody batted an eyelid to it.

From doing this task, it has opened my eyes and show me that you need to make a production plan, this involves been flexible for your team/group. You need to make sure when they are all available for weeks in advance so you know when best to film etc. You need all your gear ready as well, like props for instance. We couldn’t reconstruction without certain props. This all needs to be applied for continuity and so on. I believe when it comes to editing my own media text, I will need to practice and explore to get the hang of it and produce what I want. I noticed problems only occurred when you’re not fully prepared planned but once you get on track you’re sorted for weeks to come.