Editing

Yesterday I had a session editing on my own guys, it was weird not having anyone there to work with but nonetheless i managed to try out a split screen.
I spoke to Sir about it and ihe mentioned it may have been a bit easier if we were to have shot the whole 'making tea' from further away. This would only help because when trying to the put two shots on the screen, some of them will end up being rather squashed and looks very unproffesional.
Firstly, i tried it vertically but it seemed to cut out the majority of the shot, for example the mug, i had to cut out the handle. Therefore, i tried to do it horizontally, this seemed to have worked slightly better but however not much of a difference.
I spoke to sir and he said if we were to re-shoot then perhaps we should frame it so there is an empty space on the left and the main object is on the right. NOTE- Try using the camera
long ways (to add more footage) and at different angles.

I looked at a video from Reqiuem for a dream, and the montage in it is shot extremely well. Their split screen looks amazing too.
Check it out guys.. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vdSRG5HVlao

:)

Pictures of Latest Shoot

These are the photographs from behind the scenes at our Second Shoot, and of the outdoor filming. Just to give an idea on location and look of our opening shots.

We love Media This much...
There were perfect filming conditions in terms of lighting and ambience, sadly it was FREEZING.

Our chosen location brought to you in canted angle.

This is what our opening shot will probably end up looking like.

Title Ideas

Here is our first brainstorm for our Film Title:
- The Hostage
- The Betrayal
- Miss Harris
- Miss Williams
-

Mid Re-Shoot Post

So we're halfway through our reshoot now and having shot all the new opening sequence shots we are now waiting for actors while doing some admin. Including shot logs, shooting schedules. We have the issue of rearranging the set to not disrupt continuity. Also we had poor lighting in the last shoot, and while we need to redo the lighting, we cannot change it so much so that there is a massive difference. We need to really concentrate on issues of continuity including make-up and costume. We purposely set this time aside in order to get organised as we have less time to shoot this weekend and we want to be more efficient than previous shoots.
I hope it all goes to plan.

Initial Storyboard

This is the initial storyboard for the opening sequence we are creating. It has been changed masses from this original, but this is the group's original vision. Knocked up in a short amount of time this storyboard has minimal annotations, but was drawn up to visualise the sequence; this was all in order to think about continuity and camerawork (framing and cutting points). This is why issues like realism in drawings took a back seat for this storyboard.
This is the first page which has a camera move which we are really excited about putting into the sequence, which is the camera zooming into a screen in one room and zooming out in another. Perhaps its already clear that this storyboard lacks a clear enough opening (where are we?), but we overlooked this originally. The sequence then becomes more conventional and the next few pages show how the sequence continues and finishes, but the aim of this storyboard was not to explain the sequences to an audience, instead it was purely for the use of the group.

We are plan to constantly change and update this storyboard from now till the end of editing. So revised versions will be posted.

Capturing

In today's lesson we captured our footage from the shoot from Saturday. We looked through it and noticed a few issues, such as lighting and continuity. We are happy with the first few takes of the opening sequence, but we feel that lighting got worse towards the end. The acting we felt was better on the test shoot, but this presents issues with continuity because our actress wore a slightly different top. The make-up didn't turn out as nicely as previously done at the test shoot but we had to carry on with how it was. We also felt that some shots were definitely not as good as we would have hoped, some shots had extension leads in and also very bad lighting. However, we were very happy this time with the smoking shots, with Hannah holding a lamp behind Bekah it really created the silhouette effect of the smoke that we were hoping for! We are hoping to do many different cut aways with all the montage shots we took, which we think will give the ending the feel we were eager for.
We said before that we were aiming for at least three takes for every shot we did, and this was definitely the right choice to make. In fact we ended up taking, for some shots, up to six takes! This was certainly the right thing to do, as in some cases there are takes where furniture/lighting is wrong but in the other takes they look much better. It really shows the importance of doing several takes.
Overall, we think the first opening shots were really good & were shot exactly how we pictured them. On the other hand, we may need to re-think what hostage video to use and also what we are going to do about the lighting issues we came across. We are definitely considering another shoot if only for an hour or so, but depending on when the actors and the group can make it. The things were learnt at the test shoot truely helped speed things up, it meant we were able to do certain camera movements ourselves without having to ask other members in our group to help (was very time consuming).


Plan for Next lesson:
We need to go through each shot and vote for the best takes.
We need to decided for definite the best take on each.
& then we need to start putting the sequence together, fitting in our initial ideas for effects and alternating them if necessary.

Final shoot

29th November 2008


Last Saturday was our final shoot to do everything and so for us it was a very important shooting. The plan:
Tom and Hannah would arrive at my house at 9:00 and we would finish off our written work until 12 when Bekah was due to arrive. Bekah was to arrive around 12-12.30 and Sian at 2:00.
The first three hours that the group had before actors started to arrive was used productively. We finished off our storyboard and did our shooting script; we had to make sure that the final shoot went a lot smoother than our test shot. We had already started the storyboarding in our lesson and so we didn’t have too much to finish. Near the end of our 3 hours we took time out to go and set up our locations. We decided on lighting and positioning in the shed and also the living room.
As Sian was unable to attend the start of the shooting due to prior arrangements we decided to use the time effectively and with the equipment and actors we had we started to shoot the living room scene. There were 4 shoots to be filmed here with at least 3 takes of each. These were done well but we did come across a continuity error when filming. We realised that if we were filming these shots in the morning then there will be natural light coming in but by the time we come to film the last shot of the actual hostage video, it would be dark. And so Tom suggested we cut off all sources of natural light and use artificial lighting instead, this way we could create the exact scene when we came to film later on. BUT during shooting our living room shots we came across something that could really affect our overall sequence… we realised we hadn’t used the headphones for the first shot and when we went to find them; we couldn’t. We knew we couldn’t go on shooting without them otherwise our sound would be awful but we also new it was too late to phone miss or even pop into school. After panicking for at least 5mins we called around to see whether anyone had any headphones worth using, eventually we called Sian and thankfully she knew someone who was willing to lend us them, and so she collected them on her way round.
We were lucky to have noticed it before we started filming any scene which included dialogue; we were also careless to have not checked our equipment thoroughly! After this issue was resolved and Sian turned up we started filming the shed sequence. We did Sian and Bekah’s make-up and blood. The shoot in the shed went well and we managed to shoot everything with lots of different takes to choose from.

Overall, the shoot went well and we managed to get everything done. Again, I think our group get along really well and there weren’t many disagreements on ideas and discussion : )