Filming: Session 2

This weekend, although started out fairly hard turned out to be fairly successful with us getting the majority of our filming done. It took a large part of the day to the filming but this was mainly due to the late start and the fact that we had to move to a different location.

Our original plan was to meet for 10.00, on Sunday morning all at the same place. This quickly fell through however and we decided to postpone it to 10.30. At that time we were all in different places, I was outside school, where we were orginally supposed to meet. Diana and Clara were outside Belair Park and Kalyani was being driven to school by her Mum. As we were all in different places we decided, I would wait at the school and the take Kalyani to the location and Diana and Clara would walk over there and start.  Unfortunately Diana and Clara don't live in Dulwich meaning that they didn't know there way around and they didn't know where we were filming. This meant that I had to give them directions, which didn't go very well. When Kalyani arrived at 11, her Mum drove us down to the location, when we arrived Diana and Clara weren't there. They had been walking around trying to find it for the last half hour. So we had to go and find them and then walk down to the place, it turns out that they had walked past the location at least twice. So we started filming around 11.30, with Diana and Clara not being in the best of moods.

From then on the filming went great, we filmed for around 20 minutes in Lovers Walk and then got on the bus to go to Clapham. We quickly filmed Clara's section as she needed to go home and then soon afterwards we were done. I arrived home at around 6.00.

Looking back at the footage now, we are extremely happy with it. We filmed far too much which in many ways is a positive, as it gives us many options about which ones to choose. The only things wrong with the footage are that one or shots aren't fully straight which may be a problem. We will have to look at the footage and decide what to do as re-shooting may be a massive pain, and is one which we would like to avoid. Another problem may be the sound as there was several lines of dialogue which didn't come out fully clearly, though this should be able to be easily fixed.

AF

Filming: Session 1

Unfortunately I was unable to make it to the first weekend of filming, this didn't turn into too much of a problem however as Diana lives extremely close to our actresses' house were we were filming that weekend. Also during that day our plan we to only film a small section, so I didn't miss too much.

As I wasn't at the shoot that day, this is a summary of how Diana said the day went and my view on the footage that was taken.

From what Diana has said it sounds like the filming went extremely well, as it was only with the one actress and Diana meaning very little organisation was needed. They filmed including breaks from 12pm to 5.30pm.

From the footage you can clearly see that lighting is an issue, this was because as expected one of the lights died out fairly quickly meaning that several of the shots had different light. However our original plan was to play around with the colour in editing so this can all be fixed later. During our last media lesson, I researched how to play around with colour in Final Cut Pro and it seems do-able, with several different features that you can use to adjust the colour. So I certainly don't think it will be a problem. Below you can see the difference in the shots.

There is also a couple of shots that Diana either needs to reshoot or shoot. This can be easily done however as again Diana lives really near to the actress' house meaning that she can go over any time and film. The part she needs to reshoot there is a shot of the box with a lock on it in one a shot and then no lock in the next and then she forgot to take an extreme close up shot of the necklace, which is a fairly important shot so needs to be done.

The sound faced no challenges for Diana and sounds perfect on the computer, this is because there was only one line of dialogue and it was inside, so there was very little ambient sound to interfere with the dialogue. Next week sound will become more of an issue when we are outside and on the street where there is a lot of ambient sound.

Diana also took extra shots which were weren't on the storyboard, this in my opinion is exactly what we need to do as it is far better to have more shots than we need than not have enough. We need to have as many different shots as possible to keep it interesting and show our ability to use a range of different shots.

DY

Storyboards

DY

Lighting Practise

This week we did another practical practise session, this time looking at how to light a scene. This was extremely helpful as it gave us loads of useful information which we need for our actual shoots. The main thing we noticed was the battery life of the lights, its very short. As we were the second group to use them, the first group was using them for around 20 minutes, they ran out for us after around 15 minutes. This means that you only really have half an hour to use them, before you have to charge them again which could take around an hour. We need to be aware of this when filming as it would be awful if we are on location and one of the lights that we need runs out.

AF

Shooting Schedule

We currently don't know the exact dates that we are going to be doing the filming but we do know what weekends we want to do them.

UPDATE: Just had to change our shooting schedule around slightly. Now most of the dates are finalised. Unfortunately one of actors cancelled on us meaning that we had to re-cast her again (for the 3rd time), however annoying this was, it isn't the end of the world as we hadn't began filming with her yet.

AF