The Butterfly Effect

Jun 7, 2024
3 min read

‘The Butterfly Effect’ reflects on a young adult who realises the compounding effect of her everyday decisions when the consequences remain inevitable. This was for my Advanced Video Production & Editing module, and I got to apply advanced practical, conceptual and aesthetic aspects of video editing and post production learnt in a non-linear environment as shown in 'The Butterfly Effect'.

Being the producer and editor of this short film, I have not only garnered the hard skills of producing, but I have also discerned soft skills throughout this short film, from pre-production to post-production.

During pre-production, I felt that it was more important for my group to be as well-prepared as possible in terms of planning. Despite other groups having already started filming, our group was relatively slow in comparison as I felt it was important to have an AV Script before our shoot so we could have a clearer idea of what each scene required and to familiarise ourselves with the script better. Looking back, I am so glad our group did up the AV Script prior to filming as other groups who rushed into production had to do more on-the-dot improvisation in terms of the shot sizes and some even had to reshoot. Although doing up the AV Script was a taxing process as our group had to meet on multiple occasions (nearing production dates, we met up almost every day) and there were many areas in the story that we felt lacked substance. One major issue that I encountered when we were writing our AV Script was trying to bring out the ‘Butterfly Effect’ more as I realised we were increasingly straying towards the ‘Domino Effect’ rather than the ‘Butterfly Effect’.

Another issue that I encountered during pre-production was our cast. Although our casting went extremely smoothly, we had to remove one of our casts right before our shoot date. This was because that cast member was increasingly being unprofessional by texting me during ungodly hours about his private matters, which made me feel uncomfortable. Although the last-minute changes in the cast made things more troublesome (as we had to cast for another person for his role and do the script-reading all over again), we felt that it was a necessary precaution for the safety of ourselves as well as other cast members who might be on set with him.

Moving on to production, although I spent a lot of time during the pre-production process making sure that everything is planned as thoroughly as possible (call sheets, AV Script, release of rights forms, script breakdown sheets, costume & makeup list, crew list, location survey checklist, production schedule, props list, shooting schedule, storyboard), there were still many hiccups during production. These delays caused my group to eventually not be able to end as per scheduled time and we could not return our equipment on time. One main takeaway from this would be to have better time-management skills and to expect the unexpected. Although we had given ample time in our shooting schedule in case our casts were late, we did not expect so many of them to be late and to be late for so long. To make sure that this would not happen on consecutive days of filming, we pushed the call time even earlier, and fortunately, they were on time for the rest of the filming dates.

For post-production, the main issue we faced was not having enough time for the video we initially planned. We initially planned for 2 storylines as we felt it would be able to showcase the ‘Butterfly Effect’ better, however, one of our storylines was already almost 8 minutes long. We did not want to compensate by chopping up each scene which may cause the film to feel rushed or confusing, hence, I decided that it would be best to stick with one storyline and incorporate some scenes from the second storyline into it as a flashback. This caused us to not be able to use the majority of the shots we painstakingly took, which was such a waste. Hence, one main takeaway would be to have better planning and not be too ambitious.

Since each member has been assigned to a different role for post-production, we would often have to transfer files to each other to edit on different things, which was another issue we faced. And often during this process, we would face technical issues which can be so frustrating.

Although this was one of the hardest production project, it was also one of the most fulfilling one.

I also created a 1-minute promotional video for the short film, check it out!