From the Archives: Extended Degree

Since it's been a while since I posted any of my prior work on here I thought I'd show some of the films produced last year on the Extended Degree in Media course. These films served as good creative practice that has helped me this year.
"The Policeman and his 'Balls'"

The first film I every made for university was for a project in which we had to produce a film based on an urban myth, my contribution to this film was sourcing the story we would base it on, provided the policeman's outfit (from where I work) and of course acted in it. While at the time it was interesting to work in such a way that we hadn't done previously in retrospect it feels very amateur: The white balance and exposure constantly changes (due to the time of day it was filmed at and the lack of ANY white balancing) due to a lack of audio equipment and the music is too loud, the editing looks amateur (with Windows Movie Maker and a change in aspect ratio), the sound design is awful (the background noise drowns out the dialogue) and the acting on my part is bad as I keep looking at the camera, (the cameramen were snickering the whole time). That being said it was quite fun to do and it was an interesting outing for our first project.
"The Terror Mutant Robots"

This project was produced entirely by myself, the brief was to create something that resembled the style of a particular filmmaker or genre. For this I chose the style of B-movies from the fifties in which a lot of badly acted and written sci-fi films were shot with virtually no budget, rather than producing an entire movie I decided it would be more practical just to make a trailer for one. I watched some trailers for this type of movie (like "THEM!", "Plan 9 from Outer Space" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still") as well as the movie "Be Kind Rewind". All the special effects shots were done in front of a blue screen using Dalek models, Star Wars figures and just general bits and bobs, the effects are deliberately bad and cheesy and the use of stock footage and over the top narration only add to the campiness. On the whole I'm personally proud of it. (Even though it looks crap, I spelt 'Mutant' wrong twice!).
"The Times are Changing"

This film was mostly inspired by the opening credits of "Watchmen", we were tasked to make a film about time in some way, being a sucker for history I chose to do it on the changing face of Sheffield, using footage from "Sheffield a City on the Move" and other documentaries I think it shows a good comparison of how much the town has changed, I just wish I could have made some of the shots match up better.