At Solent Uni my main focus in the Media Production course is the major project and in this blogpost, I will describe one of the critical incidents I have had that has helped me to move forward on my journey within this drama project.
Did you ever feel stuck in a place for a long amount of time and didn’t understand how and why this was happening? This has been my case in the major project a few times. When creating or working on something new, self-doubt is bound to kick in. The thing is I have never written a script or had anything to do with working on feature films so this was very new territory for me. The idea of creating a short-movie and facing this new challenge got me really excited though and I am now still very motivated. A new experience like this is an incredible opportunity to learn something completely new and with the help of lecturers you get new perspectives on things.
A big part of my project is to figure out how the short and the feature film will be related to one another. At the beginning I didn’t quite know how to approach the short to feature aspect. Creating an entire feature film would have been excessive so therefore it made more sense to create a short film which would then potentially be a selling argument for the feature film further on. This kind of approach has been used quite a few times i.e. Whiplash. Whiplash was originally a 17 minute short-movie before it turned out to be an amazing feature film. Looking back to the short movie what I have learned about the whole concept is that you can get very creative with the short movie. Yes it’s supposed to lead to the feature but how you do it is fully up to you. Whiplash solved this by simply taking a scene from the feature film and using it as the short and it has pretty much the same dialogue and a lot of the characters are even the same in the feature as well which is very interesting. In my opinion this worked wonderfully because when I watched the short movie I couldn’t wait to see the feature, so i would say the filmmakers accomplished their goal 100%. An interesting thing I learned about Whiplash or better so the director/screenwriter of the movie is that it’s important to keep the same mood of the story. In his short of Whiplash he had completely different setting than in the feature: “Don’t become a slave to what you’ve done before,” (Jon Fusco 2016). So essentially what I have learned from this is that it is important to keep in mind the mood and feel of the feature and to not drift off of this in the short.
This helped me a lot to understand that I can be very creative with the short. In my case I have a rough idea of the feature film that I have developed over the last few months and so my aim with the project is that the short film is a prequel to the feature. It is supposed to get the audience hooked in wanting to know more about the character/story.
I hope this was an interesting insight to my work and that you have gained something from it. Thank you for reading and have a great day!
JON FUSCO, 2016. Watch: How ‘Whiplash’ the Short Led to ‘Whiplash’ the Oscar-Winning Feature [viewed 9.3.11 Available from: https://nofilmschool.com/2016/10/watch-short-whiplash-damien-chazelle
M A T T E Ø 
This is a good discussion that draws on good examples to tell a story about your own practice. I would suggest perhaps that you could do the same with another example of a short to feature by way of contrast/comparison in order to broaden the discussion. It will also serve to triangulate (i.e. get a fix your theoretical position) your discussion and offer a starting point for reflecting on a way forward. So now, having established you have a creative aspect to your personality what are you going to do with it and how are you going to develop your idea?
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