The Filming Process...

Our original provisional filming date was the 9th of march, however our actress couldn't attend at the last minute due to other college commitments so we had to reschedule to the following thursday, the 16th of march. I feel we were well prepared for filming and we had done all the recces, call sheets and risk assessments necessary. The first location we filmed at was the audition room.

At first, progress was slow as we set up and established where the camera was going to be in relation the the actress, what we wanted the actress (Lauren) to do and adjusted the room to fit the script/storyboard. We could draw on our past experience of making a previous film for the preliminary excercise and knew exactly what was involved with the process, we also had a much better idea of what it was we wanted to produce this time around. This was our preliminary excercise: "The Meeting" -

All members of the group had a very clear image about what we want our finished film to look like which we put onto paper by doing scripts and storyboards. When filming last week, we follwed these fairly closely although we did alter some angles slightly. Unfortunatly we ran out of time and were losing light, so decided to reschedule for the next filming session which will be this thursday the 25th of march. Tomorrow we plan to capture the last of the needed shots so that next week we can properly start the editing process.

The First Reflective Main Exercise Blog Entry Thing!

We have now started to plan for the main excercise. I feel we have adapted well to a new group member and are working well together. We are almost ready to film next week and have completed our first two draft scripts - 1st draft & 2nd draft

As a group, we discussed who we wanted to aim our film at and what our target audience would want to see. After brainstorming ideas, we agreed that a 'chick flick/musical' film would be popular with young females and also this genre has already proven popular with this audience. Examples would include; 'Hairspray, Camp Rock, Legally Blonde, Freaky Friday' and 'Lizzie Mcquire'. We have managed to come up with a brief storyline for the film, to give us more of an idea of what needs to happen within the opening sequence. After doing some research, we noticed that long shots are normally used to show the location and set the atmosphere for the film, for example at the beginning of Camp Rock, we see a large white house surrounded by a white picket fence with a green lawn and trees, with dogs barking and birds singing in the background. This gives the stereotype of a family home in a friendly neighbourhood.

I have noticed how much more needs to be done for the main excercise compared the the preliminary excercise. Five things I plan to do differently in the main excercise are; learn more about the technical aspects (e.g. a more complicated editing site and what formats we can save our film in and how they are different), offer more ideas and try to be more creative, write more detail about everything - like the production schedule, props/costume, research notes etc, doing more outside of lessons (writing up notes at home and doing extra research into audience etc) and as a group we want to make our film look as professional as possible, and a big part of this will rely on continuity editing.

We plan to film next week and I think we are all feeling quite confident about how our film will turn out, but we need to work closely with our script and storyboard, and consider what we find out in our research to make sure codes and conventions are thought about thoroughly.