Filming and Editing the Preliminary Exercise

Before we could even begin to start filming we had to search for locations to shoot. We had some ideas of what kind of setting we wanted: mostly it was either an office scene or a dark room. We searched in lots of different places, mainly around the college to find a suitable spot for filming. One of the main reasons why we stuck to searching for locations in college was because we thought that it had a variety of different looking rooms and locations for us to choose from.

In the end after looking around different rooms we decided on the TV studio in the media department of the college for our place to film. The studio had the ability of changing the lighting and the black wall served as a good background and fitted in with the style of two hit-men meeting.

The day of filming generally went well overall. Thanks to our planning (i.e. writing the script, planning the story boards etc) we managed to film most of the shots without and problems. As the camera operator I found the storyboards a big help for framing up the shots correctly. I feel if we didn’t plan this before hand, our shots would have suffered on the day of shooting and would defiantly made the day of filming much longer.

However a few things did go wrong on the day of filming. One of the actors showed up late and the second didn’t turn up before which left us to hunt for actors at the last minute. Luckily we found one but our film didn’t have the dress codes we wanted because of this. If we had time I would have made them come in suits to match the scene rather than casual clothing. Also the new actor we found was female, but we orginally cast the two actors as both male. We decided that we should take advantage of this. We made the female actor the more dominant in the scene the change the usual sterotyping that the male is the more dominant.

Another minor issue was the lighting in the TV studio. Due to the fact that none of our group had previous experience with lighting, it meant that we could not set up the lights ourselfs. We were going to get our lecturer to do it for us instead but he was in a meeting at the time of filiming so we had to get another member of the media department to do it for us.

The lighting system was new to us so it got us quite a while to get used to it and then after each shot we would normally have to change the lighting around to make sure everything was lighted correctly. It was sometimes cause shots to be lighted incorrectly and meant we had to do serveral extra takes. Again this wasn’t a major issue but could have been avoided if we set up and tested all the lighting early and got experience with it.

After the filming we started to begin the editing process. I thought that this would be the easiest part of the excerise but it proved to be the most difficult of the whole thing. We filmed on a hard drive camera instead of tape due to the fact that it would be easier to edit on the computers. However we found it was incompatible with the computers we were using to edit. We overcame this by bringing in a laptop instead that we could edit with. The editing went fine after this. Although, after the main edit we did have to make the cuts faster because they seemed a little slack.

First skills audit for the G321 Foundation Production

At the beginning of the preliminary exercise the idea of making the video was exciting. The exercise sounded both fun and interesting, mainly because I have never made a full video before. I have used video cameras before though and this gave me an extra interest in the task. I was also hoping to improve my skills with a camera during this task allowing me to take better framing of shots etc.

I was interested in using the skills I already had, such as my previous experience with a camera, as well as improving my weaker attributes. For example time management and research skills. During the planning stage it was required to plan out a schedule of what we were going to do on each day. Doing this allowed me to keep better management of the tasks we were set to do and keep track of things in a more organised way. Furthermore it enabled us to do the tasks in order. Also, searching on the internet for videos with similar themes helped improve my research skills. I feel that I have improved both time management skills and research skills during the planning stages.

At a few points in the planning process I was slightly concerned that the assignment had so much scope and so many ways that it could be completed that we may over complicate things too much. However this proved not to be the case as we set what we wanted to do fairly early on in the planning stage. This allowed us to concentrate on the shots and other elements rather than getting distracted on changing the idea later on.

Usually when I am set a task or a project I don’t plan as much as I should. This can cause parts of the task going wrong at a later stage causing major problems. Doing a task this way can be more time consuming than first expected as you think you are saving time from skipping out parts of the planning stage. But during the planning stages of the preliminary exercise I have found that it is very important to plan carefully what you want to do. For example, instead of going out and filming straight away, we planned all our shots which let us see problems with certain shots or angles. By doing it this way we saw any problems almost immediately and could pick which shots worked best and fitted together.

Test

This is a test.