BFI Film Academy Course 2022: Short Film Project

I participated in the BFI Film Academy course 2022 where we were chosen to learn all about the fundamentals of film production starting from pre-production, animation to creating our very own short film within learning about the practical aspects of filmmaking. As an aspiring creative writer, I was focused heavily on the screenwriting and creating the creative vision for our final short film project.

The briefing consisted of simply making a short film about anything we wanted within our set filmmaking groups. Thus, with much collaboration of ideas and building up of alternative ideas and narrowing down the rough outline of what our concept and narrative would be - we also had to take into account the time limit we had for our film which would be a run time five minutes. We managed to draft a doable story framework and concept that would be both align well with our set run time and still be interesting to watch - we decided to create a simple yet entertaining murder mystery story.

We decided to go for different appearances of characters by consistently cutting to ‘random’ statements, each upholding and expressing fragmented narratives and stories around the murder of one of the characters. We wanted to put forth active spectatorship in order to fulfil the main objective of making our short film which is to make it very entertaining. Thus, constructing these fragmented narratives were scattered and compiled within certain scenes so that the audience can actively engage to piece the murder puzzle by the end of the short film.