We wanted to make a short film and was discussing the idea with another friend, Jason Conway, who offered to donate one of his short stories. Out of two possibles, A Question of Taste was chosen. The story can be read here. You'll need Acrobat Reader to view it.

Many ideas came out in pre production stages and it was decided very early to give the film a noir feel, very grainy, dark, shot in black and white. The idea came then to shoot with no dialog, and include a voice over. This type of feel to the film version came out by the writing of the short story itself.

After a few weeks of discussions and decisions on making the final preparations the shoot finally took place during two Saturdays in August.

The intention was to film the whole shoot during one day, but a typical English summertime put a stop to the outdoor shoot being done.

There was no real planning for the shoot, we decided to film any idea and just get loads of footage on tape and then see what we can use. This, however, proved to be a slight problem, and the footage began to vary from the screen play part of the way through.

For the shoot, we used one camera, a Sony VX2100, with two 20watt Sony video lights mounted on tripods.

The indoor set was my lounge, as it's decor is plain and only minor furniture removal/rearranging occurred to get the necessary space.

Lighting became a nightmare due to the pesky window in the lounge, even the two 20watt lights at close range were not strong enough to light the set adequately in some scenes, so it was all bulbs on in the lounge!

Once we had all the footage we needed, it was off to the edit suite. Adobe Premiere Pro was my tool of choice, Premiere has been my preference since about version 4 - I love it. Having recently buying the Adobe Video Collection I considered I had all the tools I would ever need to create the most amazing video's I could imagine. It certainly was a wise investment.

The first draft run showed us that we needed more footage - another problem caused by poor planning on the day of the shoot! There were a few shots we all considered as missing, so a further day was planned to fill in the gaps.

The Look Suite from Magic Bullet Editors gave me the film look we wanted, the sepia and diffusion filters made the dream sequence stand out more from the black and white footage used in the rest of the film.

Once we had the approved final draft, the project was imported into After Effects for colour correction and effects addition, smoother keying of opticals including the fades and burns. The Dutch Films logo was also composited using After Effects.

The final production is 2 minutes 36 seconds in length. For such a short story and a short film, alot of work went into it, and it was a great learning experience.

Although we are all very pleased with the final film, there was a lot of mistakes made in the production and with learning from these we could make a more better next film, which is what we are planning to do.

All in all, the whole process of making this film was a very enjoyable one, something we shall do again. So, if you haven't already, sit back, relax and watch the film.