Preliminary Study

I filmed this preliminary study a while ago but I never got round to publishing it here. We had to exhibit our ability to use a match on action, shot-reverse shot and that we could follow the 180 degree rule.

The challenging part was the fact that I had to film this freehand because I couldn't find a useable tripod at the time, but I think all things considered I managed to do so with minimal shaking or blurriness. Furthermore, having my friends as actors did not help at all. They kept laughing, despite one of them being a drama student. The amount of unusable material we produced as a result is truly surreal. I wish I had time to make blooper videos for all these projects.

DY

Filming: Session 3

This final session went significantly smoother than the previous one. At 11:00, we met at Piccadilly Circus underground station; a journey which took me and Clara about 20 mins because we live so close to a tube station. Everyone arrived promptly, Adam ready with the equipment and directions and me with the storyboards and props. Our organisation, I'd venture, had improved vastly through the trials and errors of the previous weeks.

After setting up for filming on location, we turned on the camera and found it only had about 24 mins of battery time; Adam hadn't charged it correctly. However, this was only a minor setback, as we projected that we had enough time as long as we switched the camera off/put it to sleep in-between takes. The other downside was the weather, which metamorphosed from moderate gloom to spitting rain about two-thirds of the way through filming. However, despite this, we managed to shoot almost all our footage before the camera shut down right before us managing our last two takes. In the end, this didn't pose a real problem; we went into a coffee shop down the street and allowed our actress for Al to warm up while we charged the camera. It had been a problem making her run back and forth, putting on her coat between filming so she didn't freeze, so this was a welcome and timely respite from the weather and stress.

Adam was in charge of recording the sound in this section, as we have the bulk of our dialogue at the end of our sequence. He conducted this with an exceptional degree of professionalism and the result is, as you'll see, excellently clear sound; something we know groups in previous years have struggled to achieve in their work. I'm not sure how much enjoyment he got out of squatting on the ground out of shot of the camera for intermediate amounts of time, but at the very least his hard work paid off.

In the end, we shot the last few scenes within minutes and went home happy. Luckily, the rain we battled through didn't even show up on film; something we were all grateful for, I think. This session concluded our filming, and we could begin editing and other post-production at last. I did enjoy this part of the coursework, but I feel that it would have been easier if we were a professional team with no other responsibilities apart from getting it done. Some day, maybe.

AF & DY

Filming: Session 2

I've let blog updates fall by the wayside for the last few weeks due to the hectic pattern of filming and editing, but now that shooting is over I have time to retrospectively review the two other days on-set.

The session begun as if some higher power was purposefully working against us whilst loudly, obnoxiously laughing. We were scheduled to meet on Sunday morning at 10, outside of school. We had some problems with transportation (the actress for Mal, Kalyani, was coming from a different part of London and needed to go home to change into costume, whilst mine and Clara's lift was postponed due to her sister taking precedence). We could always have taken public transport, but I didn't cherish the thought, as I was the one in charge of all the equipment. In the end, we resolved to meet at 10:30. Clara and I were lifted to the nearby park for her mother's convenience, and I messaged Adam that we'd meet him and Kalyani straight at Lover's Walk. However, I made the fatal mistake of asking him to send me the postcode so we could walk there via Google Maps, since Clara and I aren't local to the area and therefore had little idea of where to go. After Adam sent us to the wrong location twice (and we at one point ironically walked straight through where we were supposed to go, not noticing because the gate we expected to see had been removed), I told Adam and Kalyani to come pick us up from a street corner. I then revoked Adam carry the equipment I'd been dragging from place to place for the better part of an hour as punishment for his inability to copy-paste an address line. Mostly, I'm just sorry for the pressure we put on our actresses, especially Clara who had requested we film as quickly as possible because she was having a bad week for homework... But I digress.

The rest of filming, fortunately, went about as smoothly as it could. The vital shots on that godforsaken side path were completed within about 20 mins, and we then took the bus to Clapham Common, where we filmed the rest of Al's scenes and finally allowed at least one of our put-upon actresses to go home. Mal's waking up shots didn't take long either and, in the end, we finished with a few hours of daylight to spare and the better part of the evening ahead of us.

The footage came out just fine. There were a few pieces of dialogue that we filmed but didn't use the sound equipment for, which was perhaps lazy of us, but I'm not sure it would have made a difference anyway as the microphones are very sensitive and there was both wind and an endless barrage of people surrounding us on location. The important thing is, the words are audible, and even if we do decide to dub it the process of recording will take two actors and five minutes. The only visual problem is that, at one point, the sloping angle of the satanic path we for some reason chose as our location makes it look like the camera is tilted. Hopefully, we won't have to go back there and re-shoot. If we do, I'm sending Adam alone.

DY

Lighting Practice

In preparation for filming, we did a small filming task to practice lighting techniques. The battery life of the lights was brought to our attention by the fact that the second group ran out of time to use them and had to re-charge. In all, the batteries only last around 20 minutes; a fact that I later carefully planned around on the first day of filming. However, in retrospect, this didn't matter much, as one of the lights quickly dimmed for some reason, and so, in the end, I hardly used the lights at all. As the rest of our film takes place outside, it seems that this task was the crux of our practical work with that side of film production.

DY

Filming: Session 1

The first weekend of filming was fairly successful, possibly because we only had one production team member and two actresses involved. Including breaks, filming took from 12pm to 5:30pm.

There were several issues with the lighting, considering the fact that one of the lights dimmed fairly quickly to a sort of orange tone and the other light was too stark in contrast, meaning most of the shots probably lack depth. However, since we're planning to play around with colour in editing anyway, hopefully the difference between the cold natural light and brighter tones when lighting is used can be evened out later. 

There is also a continuity error that we will need to refilm at one point (the music box has a lock on it in one shot and no lock the next), as well as an important shot which I forgot to take of an extreme close-up of the necklace with the key on it. This will hopefully be ratified the coming weekend, as I live only a few minutes away from the location; fixing these issues should take only a few minutes. 

The sound has thus far been fine, probably because the only piece of dialogue we've had has been inside, and so there was little ambient sound to interfere with the quality. The real challenge in terms of that should be this week, as we'll mostly be out in a park and in the city. 

There are also several occasions where I took the liberty of taking extra shots that hadn't been planned in the storyboard, simply because the opportunity presented itself (such as the shots with the actress's cat). We won't be able to use all of these, of course, but nevertheless they may provide some more interesting transitions or points of view on the characters and settings used.

DY

Vox Pops

These are a couple of vox pops we did in order to better understand our target audience and any adjustments we may need to make to our narrative to not antagonize our potential future viewers.



AF & DY

Preparatory Group Task - "The Package"

"The Package" is a preliminary practice task we filmed in school in order to get used to the camera and editing software available to us. The process of filming itself was fun, but the editing got a little stressful due to the fact that everyone in the group had different ideas about how to present the work. The theme music used in this feature is original, which certainly improved the overall ambience. Additionally, the sense of self-irony created by the use of certain sound effects towards the end is, in my opinion, an especially high point of this film. Conversely, the framing of some of the shots is uncertain or over-focusing on something unimportant; in future, more care needs to be taken in terms of weighting and depth. Furthermore, the importance of ambient sound was made apparent to me thanks to this work; the scenes where there were several layers of sound effects were significantly more effective than those with only the music or dialogue present. Lastly, to aid continuity, it is obvious that the more shots are taken on the day the better. This also allows for any mistakes in filming to be cut out and replaced easily, without the hassle of having to reshoot certain scenes.

DY