Umbra Hominis - How does it meet the brief?

Umbra Hominis review

I believe that the strengths of the Umbra Hominis opening sequence are the video effects that we chose to use and the costume that we constructed for the Umbra Hominis. I think this because the Umbra Hominis looks like some depictions of the grim reaper but it different enough to be individual and stand out. The effects that we used create the sense that the world is slowly falling apart. I think that to improve the opening we could focus on the sound a bit more as the sound that we used was royalty free music from the internet. I feel that a custom-made soundtrack would help the opening to be a bit more believable and would make it seem more personal.

We organised the opening in the order that we did to create the sense that as Tom goes longer without his psychosis pills, he becomes more and more unstable.

0.17 – zooming into the pill bottle draws the viewers attention to it (the bottle is in the centre of the shot for the same reason. The lighting in this scene is dark to show that Tom is either asleep or not in the room.

0.23 – The opening text fades in from the shadows because it is the hallucinations name and it means “shadow man” in latin.

0.32 – We achieved this effect by playing the scene on my laptop. We recorded my screen while the clip was glitching out (which was due to the file format that they were saved in).

0.40 – We decided to use the school bell as diegetic sound in our transition to show that Tom is in a different place. This also links to the brief as our opening is set and filmed in a school.

0.45 – I feel that these jump cuts are out of place and that this scene could benefit from being in a different order. I think this because they seem disjointed and out of place. The music stopping and being replaced by the sound of the classroom is an error that we didn't catch.

0.55 – This scene is supposed to show that Tom has “lost it” and is now seeing Umbra Hominis at school. Tom Evans’ knee that is in the bottom left corner of the shot is there because he was sitting down while filming. Unfortunately, we didn't catch this before we sent the costume back, so we couldn’t re-shoot the scenes. Therefore, the in-universe reason for this is that it is either Tom's bag (main character) or another hallucination.

We have suggested that the Umbra Hominis is Tom through key scenes. These scenes include the drawing on Umbra Hominis appearing on the page without seeing who drew it. The fact that we don't see who drew it suggests that it was Tom, but that he doesn’t remember doing it.

In order to create the effect of objects overlaying each other and then fading into the background we had both of the video files playing at the same time and adjusted the opacity of them until they were suitable for our needs.

I think that we have met the brief given and would qualify for BFI funding. This is because the movie is centred around a British schoolboy. A large part of the BFI requirements is the Britishness of the movie, this includes the filming locations, actors and crew who work on various things including lighting, sound, and filming. All our actors, the director and all few are British and the school that we filmed in is located in England.