This short film was created for a uni assignment. I also had to submit a reflective summary; You can read it below if you're interested.
"My submission, “Alan Penn’s Rise to Power” is about two brothers, Max and Alan. It starts with Alan, in the year 2024, where he has just stepped down as CEO of his company, Penntech. We see him leave his house, and get in his car. As he drives we see flashbacks of Alan’s past, in 1984, presented through recordings his brother Max took of him. They show us how Alan came to create Penntech, where his proposal of an idea to a company was rejected, and so he decides to do it himself. When present day Alan reaches his destination, we see that it is his childhood home. After looking around the empty house, and inside their messy garage, Alan stumbles across Max’s old camera. Inside he finds a VHS tape titled “Alan Penn’s Rise to Power.” Alan finds a VCR, puts in the tape, and presses play.
My intent for this story was for it to be more about the brothers’ relationship than it was about Alan creating his company, but I don't think there were enough flashbacks to appropriately showcase either character. All you could really gather is that Max is excited about what Alan is doing even if he doesn't fully understand, and Alan is just grumpy he's being recorded. It has just occurred to me that there isn't much evidence that they are brothers at all. I am happy with how the vhs recordings turned out, I like how the glitchy flashes that the tape does can be used for transitions between the modern clips. And I am happy with how the different mediums are what distinguishes the flashbacks with the present time. When I had put all the footage together, I was really glad that I found the song that I used, as it was really effective in communicating to the viewer how they are supposed to feel about what they are seeing. It also lines up perfectly with some shots, where the shot changes right as a key is hit, which was good.
The main issues with production were around filming. It was an interesting experience shooting with my VHS camera as I hadn't used it in this way before. I had come to realise that when you pressed the stop recording button, it would actually rewind the tape a small amount. When I looked back on the footage, I found out that my multiple takes had written over each other, and the only full take I had would be the last one (luckily this was usually the best as that's when I would stop filming) this lead to several beginnings of shots, but only one ending of shots. In one case, a shot was short enough that it was overwritten entirely, and I couldn't end up using it in my film. There were other issues with the camera, for example, sometimes the camera would not record properly. In some parts of shots the footage and audio would either black out entirely or be super glitchy. To get around this, I would have to take certain parts of multiple shots and stitch them together to create the final shot. For example, the first flashback in my short film consists of the video of three different takes: the beginning, the end, and a glitchy segment which was surprisingly effective at creating a seamless transition, the whole audio was also taken from one other shot. The issues were not the end of the world as I did manage to get around them but they were slightly frustrating. These issues are because the camera used to be broken. I fixed it in the past but obviously there are still some issues with it, for example, the zoom buttons and the auto-focus don’t work.
With the filming of the modern segments on my phone, it was a lot smoother. My only issue and something that I have learned for the future is that I probably should have taken more footage. I stopped a shot when I thought that the take was good but when it came to editing and putting the footage together I found myself wishing I had more footage to work with.
Overall I enjoyed this assignment as I haven't really done something like this before. I am a writer but have never needed to consider a moving visual before. I definitely learned a lot about all the different things that come together to create the whole experience of a short film, and the different steps and processes that it takes to create it."