With all these elements playing together, a well told story is made, all linked through the male characters’ mate ship and story told. ‘Smoking Gun’ told the stories about domestic abuse well, but we had a few minor issues with the way it is told.                                                

Positives

The objects that worked well within ‘Smoking Gun’, was the collaboration of Fadilla and I. Fadilla brought her talent of script writing and building the story she wrote, during editing. These two strengths she had, allowed her to build the story from start to finish, the way she had understood our mutual friend’s own domestic abuse. This friend of ours, was the motivation for why we wanted to do this project. We made this project to draw attention to the topic make people feel uncomfortable and look at their own relationship, and other relationships of people.                                          

The look which the images have, was my task, to outline the shots I wanted to get from the shoot to set a tone for the story. This was completed with two cameras to make the shoot quicker and editing flow easier. With Fadilla managing the other camera, this was achieved, and we were really pleased with the look and emotion we captured within each story.

Negatives

One of the most notable obstacles and issues about the story being told, was the availability of one of our actors. For the filming of the gathering at the bar, I had to stand in for an actor who couldn’t attend that night. After arranging days before, he didn’t show and only told us of his inability and poor excuse after the shoot was complete. This makes for a very dysfunctional looking film look as I am not in any other shots or story and looks horrible and difficult to follow the narrative. We would have liked to do it at another time, but with other actors’ availability and willingness to show up after we had arranged a first time, didn’t seem fair, so we wore the trouble that the actor gave us through telling his story and lines through another face.                                                                                                           

The time we had allocated for shooting was also tight to reshoot that scene or other scenes which we were not entirely satisfied with. There were scenes which we wanted to add more or change slightly, such as different angles or greater acting ability. We couldn’t change due to the number of actors we could call upon because we weren’t satisfied with their performance. Regarding reshooting scenes for the sake of new angles and preproduction errors, would be to say the audio captured for majority of the scenes was not up to the highest standard. This was mostly due to the fact of borrowing equipment that did not work the way a separate external mic did. We learnt a lot about sound recording from this project, and sound recorded correctly during shooting, makes for post-production work to be far more time efficient.