Filming and Editing the Preliminary Exercise

The first thing our group did when we got to our filming location, (the TV Studio in the Media Studies block), was agree on where our 180' line was and where our actors would sit in relation to rule of thirds. We had carried out a risk assessment before hand and were ready to shoot. However, one of our actors failed to show due to illness but luckily we quickly found an actress to take his place. Whilst shooting our film we referred constantly back to our script and storyboard, and only made one or two changes. It was really useful having the script and storyboard as it made shooting quicker and smoother and everyone on set knew their role and what needed to be done.

Innitially we needed help with the lighting in the studio as this was a new feature to all of us, however once we had learnt the basics of how to ajust the lighting and had started filming, production ran well and efficiently.

We were set back slightly when it came to editing our film as we had the shots saved to the wrong file so instead of editing our footage on one of the college computers, David brought his laptop in and I edited it on Windows Movie Maker, with help from the rest of the group. We decided to leave out one of the shots to make the film look smoother and so the edits were less noticable. It took a while to tighten the sequence of shots up so that it wasn't 'jumpy' or noticable that the footage was shot in many shots, but we all decided that their was a noticicable difference when the shots ran into each other nicely and the speech of the actors flowed like a conversation should do. However, in the case of our film (a hitmen meeting), we wanted to keep the drama level high so therefore didn't leave much space in editing at all for hesitations and pauses between speech, and we thought this worked well and helped to reinforce the anger and furstration of our most dominant character.

Whilst watching the footage back, we noticed that the lighting was actually quite dark, and although this helps with the atmosphere of the film, it is, at times, hard to see the characters. On the other hand the contrast of lighting on the two characters works; the less dominant character is lit much brighter than the dominant character, who's face is barly visible at times, so our eye is drawn to the light, which is drawn to the character, who is looking at the other character, so through intradiagetic gaze, our focus is back on the most dominant and important character, this is also reinforced through rule of thirds.

We have now finished editing our film and are generally quite pleased with the outcome. We have made a final script and have taken notes of the footage so the next stage now is to put the film onto DVD or disc.

Links:

Edited Script

Notes on footage

Final shots