Micro drama Finished Film and Reflection

This is our finished micro drama. After editing it ended up being about 2 minutes 19 seconds long, which is okay for the length of a micro drama.

establishing long shot

The micro drama starts with an establishing shot of a live news report. Unfortunately we couldn't work out how to put text over the footage to make it look more realistic, but the orange tape we used made it look like some body reporting from a crime scene. If possible it would have probably of been better for us to get hold of some proper police tape.

establishing, point of view shot

the news report the main drama starts with a long two shot of two girls walking along in a park at what seems to be evening. This also comes across as a point of view shot of someone that seems to be stalking or watching them without them knowing. It becomes apparent quickly that these girls may be victim to the person being referred to in the news report just shown.

extreme close up

There is then an extreme close up of the girls shoe. This distracts the audience from the fact that the other girl has run off to hide. But, this shot wasn't very smoothly zoomed or edited, we should have watched it and re shot because also there is some background talking which was quite hard to avoid when shooting in the park.

false scare

We then tried to create a false scare. Unfortunately it wasn't very effective when showing in class. This may be partly due to them finding the acting funny, but mainly I think things like this will improve a lot when we have studied more into this genre and seen more example of a false scare.



We then lead on to a very long take of the girls walking, this was quite uneccessary and one of the situations where we should have used a lot more shot variety.

good lighting 

A shot I really think worked well was at 1.34 where one of the girls is walking through the tunnel on her own. Here the light is shining from behind her making her look dark and a bit like a silhouette, this looked very effective but does have quite a purple tone due to us trying to darken it whilst editing. This shot I think also looks well framed.

bad framing example

When the camera ran out of battery, we didn't turn the iphone to landscape and therefore all the footage from now on minus the end news report had to be zoomed in to fit the frame. This worked well at times but in some situations the girl was badly framed and her head totally cut off, luckily these were only short in length.

narrative enigma

An example of when the zoom worked was on the murderers feet walking towards the girl. Because you can only see the feet this creates narrative enigma as the audience are unaware as to who it might be.

After the girl is grabbed and screamed it goes back to another live news report saying two more girls had been murdered. This leaves the micro drama on a cliff hanger and could be easily continued from where this one was left.


In our micro drama I think it is very clear that the murderer who is still unknown is the antagonist or villain. The two girls are the victims and some of the other archetypes are very unclear as it was left on a cliff hanger. However our micro drama does follow the idea of Todorov and the 3 stages. The equilibrium at the start isn't exactly stable but is more so than the end. The dis-equilibrium is all the action that takes place and the two murders and the new equilibrium is the news report about what has changed. Even though the equilibriums aren't positive I still think it mostly follows this theory. Barthes theory of narrative enigma is used throughout as the murder stays unknown but partly shows his feet and the back of him/her.

Overall I think our micro drama was successful, but we definitely needed more shot variety so the editing process and the end result was better. I think we got some really interesting shots but I think it will become a lot easier to film horror based dramas when we have done more research into the drama and its conventions. Also if we had been more organised about the camera the editing process wouldn't have been as hard having to zoom all the shots. I think we would also reconsider when we shot it to reduce back ground noise.