The three musketeers as producers? Would it work?

Caught by Hitchcock's fever of film making?! Ever heard of academic dishonesty? Well, these were our two themes for our latest english group task.

We were told to take inspiration from one of Alfred Hitchcock's famous films, which were known to be filled with tension, and base our own movies on these. It started with the selection of group members, which was presented to us at random by the teacher, Mr Tattle. My group consisted of Matvey, Mihaly and myself, and for the film we chose "The Man who knew too much", or rather, in our case, "The Student who knew too much". This title was created right at the start to show the audience the link between Hitchcock's classics and the idea of plagiarism.

Our movie revolved around Matvey (the student) who was working on his essay alone in a classroom which he then leaves for unexplained reasons. Whilst all of this is happening however, another student walks in. This fellow students is named Marnix (played by Mihaly)m who moves the glasses from Matvey out of their original place to make space for him to plagiarise the essay Matvey has written. As Matvey walks back into the classroom, he bumps into Marnix whilst entering the room. Matvey then immediately realises what must have transpired during his absence from the moved glasses and in his anger and lack of emotional control, he walks out into the hallway to confront Marnix. Marnix however doesn't really seem to care all that much about his actions, thinking

g that he can get away with it. During this confrontation, it is clearly demonstrated that Marnix is far superior from Matvey when it comes to sports and fighting. Matvey realises this making a quick break for the teachers office. After a short discussion with the teacher about previous events, Mr Tattle goes to confront Marnix about his actions. During the confrontation (which takes place in Mr Tattle's office), Marnix is expelled even though he said he only did what he did because he was worried he wouldn't pass the exams. At the end this short film clearly demonstrates that being academically dishonest by plagiarising other people's work is unacceptable and that serious punishments can follow.

Overall, judging by the fact that we handed in our work before the deadline, and that we mainly used schoology in order to check for deadlines as well as a string of emails to each other, I believe that the time management has been done well. However, not all was perfect. There were times when we drifted off topic, however, this was mainly for the sake of making a quick joke and then we went back to work. Thus overall, we wasted little time overall on the filming periods.

Group work started well, none of us were to upset by who was in our group and we managed to get along well throughout the decision making process, the filming as well as the meeting we had to discuss what our goals for the day was etc..

As for the amount of work all of us did, it was mainly equal. We all contributed ideas to the plot and we all acted. However, the editing was the one part I did at home alone. This must have been the greatest weakness of the product. The reason for this being that without the other two's opinion on the scenes and the final edited work criticised, the final product wasn't so strong as it might have been. The ideas of the others could have created a more tense film then we ended up with. The music used in the film related to the topic very well, giving the scenes a more tense feeling despite some lack of extreme coordination from high points in the movie and music. However, despite this, I still believe that our end product showed promise, incorporating famous angles and techniques also used in Hitchcock's films.

For me, I believe that this whole project had both benefits and negative sides to it. Having random groups chosen with which one had to work for this project could've ended a lot worse for me. However, after having found out with whom I would be working, I was fine with the choice, knowing that if we worked hard, we could end up making a great product. A challenge certainly was coming to unanimous vote as to which camera angles we would be using for each film, which caused a small debate every now and then for a short period of time. However, these being the only real challenges, I actually turned to like this project even more due to the challenge of working with people who you don't usually work with.

If the video doesn't work, please feel free to use this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN8Lr_z4SUs

#English