EVALUATION

 The film is intended for entertainment as well as for information. It serves to explain how the Lacanian theory of the 'Lack' works. In this case, the main character is obsessed with spirituality, and the idea of 'finding herself'.

 The film is relatively organised to an extent. I feel as though we could have added more details in the transitions between scenes for the sake of continuity. For instance, when she goes from the outside of the church to the basement interior, there's no trace of snow on her coat or sound effects to suggest she's in a church. The central theme is well conveyed with the use of multiple static shots of various things in her environment that emphasise the spiritual iconography. We do this by shooting close up, shallow depth of field shots of candles, buddha statues, books relating to spirituality, spiritual quotes, 'snake oil' spiritual products, and incense sticks. Stereotypes are reinforced in my film because of these shots. We tried to think of the most stereotypical iconic products that would be found in a persons house, were that person obsessed with spirituality. This way, the short duration of the film still allows for easy development of the character, as the iconography is easily identifiable.

 We used most of our filming time arranging lighting in the rooms, using as many lamps as we could find and positioning them in ways to create subtle yet effective lighting. The scene where the girl is doing yoga is a great example of how we manipulated the light in the room to achieve specific lighting. We had two lamps on the floor, creating two shadows of her as she did yoga, to suggest that she did not see herself as complete, or whole. Then later in the film there's a shot which focuses on one shadow, which happens at the same time she gets the email telling her she's successfully 'found herself'. The downside to this is that after the yoga shot, the lights return to normal, creating a mellow, even light throughout the room. This is yet again an issue with continuity. If we were to do it again, we would keep the lighting the same all the way through.

The lighting in the cellar appeared fine while we were filming, we would move candles closer to the actors face to acheive a brighter shot, however after comparing it to the rest of the footage we realised that we should have introduced more light into the frame. It now stands out in the footage. The sound is almost perfect in our footage. There's barely any background noise thanks to careful arrangement of locations and editing. The background is only distracting at one point throughout the whole film, this is when the girl takes her phone out of her pocket, you can clearly see props behind her. We didn't notice this until we revised the footage when we got home, next time we'd make sure to hide any props. Contrast between the back and foreground is done well in some parts and very badly in others. For instance, in the basement scene there's some parallel editing that takes place between two people. One person transitions from high key lighting to heavy back lighting, turning them into a silhouette, with high contrast between back and foreground, whereas the other person basically blended into the background because the lighting was so bad. We attempted to put a candle next to their face but it still didn't work.