Q3. How did your production skills develop throughout this period?

3) How did your production skills develop throughout this period?

I worked on this film quite intensively for several months by myself. It was an extremely challenging and beneficial experience because although I have always enjoyed watching movies, I had never had the opportunity to make a formal production of my own. Right away, I learned that for me the most challenging parts of film-making were managing the color palette, finding appropriate sounds that were not locked by copyright laws, and teaching myself how to use Premier, which I had never used before.

Regarding the color palette, as I have mentioned my intention was to use a highly-stylized theme of muted blues and grays, inspired by Brick and Le Samourai. I filmed the scenes using a filter in my camera, however, there were some technical issues and some of the shots did not come out with the appropriate shading. However, in post-production I was able to go back and edit those shots to fit the overall piece. By doing this, I learned the value to post-production editing. 

For the soundtrack and general auditory atmosphere of Downtime, I chose a combination of musical and diagetic sounds. For the song that played alongside the opening credits, I was inspired by the Fallout game franchise, which plays classic mid-20th century songs to create a noir atmosphere. I initially chose It's All Over with the Crying, by the Inkspots. Unfortunately, it turned out that due to copyright issues I would not be able to use this piece after all. Therefore, I decided to rely instead on more heavily-edited diagetic elements; including a clock ticking, the whirring of a desk fan, a dripping tap, designed to create a sense of foreboding and dread. The 'reveal' of the dead body of the balcony is accompanied by a sudden silence to focus the viewers' attention and emphasize the visual impact of the shot. 

Adobe Premier is an incredibly useful piece of film editing software. It can be used to cut shots, layer sounds, add text, and color correct, to name just a few of its applications. As with any piece of software, it took some time and effort before I was able to use this software easily without having to struggle. For example, changing the opacity of the intro footage was a major challenge at first. Over time, however, I was able to reach the point where I could use to software intuitively and focus on the effect I was trying to achieve rather than getting caught up technical issues.