My Film
Overall, I am happy with the outcome. I have produced something that I feel follows the footsteps of Gordon Willis' work in The Godfather. A problem that was encountered, however, was the Canon 550D's weakness in low light conditions. The 550D struggles to record an image without noise in low light, and so I had to compromise quality for getting the correct exposure. If I were to film this again I would use a camera such as the XL2.
As for composition, I feel I captured Willis' work in The Godfather well. My characters are positioned just off centre, and are shot from above when in conversation. I tried to recreate Willis' infamous opening shot from the film, where he uses an automatic zoom out from the undertaker. However, I used a manual zoom, and as such, mine is of a lower quality, and is not smooth.
For lighting the film I took into account work I had done on previous projects. For example, previously we had to recreate a scene from a film, and we learnt how to recreate lighting. I used this knowledge in this film. Willis lights a lot of his actors from above to create the underexposed look, and I recreated this, using an ordinary table lamp to light the actors from above. I feel this effect worked well.
