Shooting Week(s!) and Project Timeline

I had finished most of my planning by the half term week and the rest of the class were in a similar position. Therefore the majority of us borrowed equipment and filmed over half term. However, my family had a holiday booked for the half term week, meaning that I needed to reschedule so that all of my actors and equipment was at my location in England, rather than Spain!

I decided to shoot at weekends because I would have more time, my dad wouldn’t have just come home from work and there would be much more lighting if I needed it. I shot most of my shots in the young girl’s bedroom the first weekend after half term and I was able to edit this footage and begin to play with filters and colour until I was able to shoot the second lot of shots. The following week I did most of the kitchen and stairs shots which I then put together on final cut with my other footage. In the evenings and following weekend I was able to film the exterior shots and extra little bits to make sure that I was able to make the 5 minutes of film that was required.

During this period, I was faced with a number of issues that meant I couldn’t film. Occasionally my sister would have birthday parties and parents evening events to go to which meant I had to adjust my schedule and film what I could. I was a little worried as the end of term approached that I wouldn’t be able to complete my work before the deadline which was Thursday 18th November. But I’d forgotten that by editing in between shooting, I was able to give myself a head start and as soon as I’d filmed my last shot, it took me about 10 minutes to add it into the scene I already had and have a finished film.

However, by spreading my shooting out so much, this did make it difficult to edit my sound design as I would always have gaps to fill in with shots and this would often lead to my sound being out of sync when I added stuff in. I decided to attach what sound I could to various pieces of footage and focus on small adjustments when all of my shots were in place.

Two weeks before the deadline, I almost had a finished film. I decided I needed to focus on putting my ancillary tasks together. I already had my ideas together and I just needed to put them together using Pixelmator. I had stills from my film and photos that I could use for both tasks as I had thought about this when shooting my film. It was just a matter of constructing them.

In the last week, as usual, I began to start living in the Mac room in my study periods, breaks and lunch times perfecting my three pieces of work. Despite all of my setbacks and delaying my filming, I managed to have a finished film and two ancillary tasks ready to hand in at the deadline!

 

Filming

In this Prezi I have talked about the problems, solutions and successes I encountered whilst filming my short film, click on the image to view the presentation.

 

LAFTAS: Filming

We were all really excited to film, and we felt we had enough planning, equipment and support that was necessary to film some of our shots, for example, we had my dad available to drive the car into the driveway. We started the day at 11am as we planned, and spent half an hour checking through our storyboards and making sure we had the right equipment and props for each shot.

We filmed in chronological order and ticked off on our storyboards to make sure we didn’t miss anything. We had in mind that if we missed out a shot, our scene would have continuity errors, as the body needed to be shown at each stage of getting out the car, so we were careful not to miss anything out.

Although I had practiced using the steadicam, I found it very difficult to use it when we started filming, mainly because quite a lot of our shots were from a low angle. Therefore, we decided to film as much as we could using the mini dolly, tripod and handheld to ensure that we had enough choice when it came to editing. As well as this we filmed a lot of extra shots that we hadn’t planned for on our storyboards, because we didn’t want to have to re-shoot anything due to our limited time frame. We also filmed each shot at least twice and looked through them to make sure they were in focus and had no little wobbles or errors.

The interior shots, we had to film on the following day due to time, location and the number of actors we had available to us. This wasn’t too much of an issue as we were able to begin editing on the Monday and have the rest of the shots ready to add in on Tuesday.

Overall, I feel that our filming went quite well, despite a few changes to the weather which meant we had to wait for the sun to go away in order to maintain consistency with the lighting throughout the film. Also, as we were planning to add filters to make it look as if we filmed at dusk, we didn’t want some shots to clearly have bright sunlight.

Here are some photos we took on the day: