Our prelim task had a big impact on our opening sequence, because it gave us some basic background knowledge and skills into filming that was vital to produce our film opening.
The preliminary task helped us to understand that to make a film it is best to do what you know, use what you have and make it as easy for yourself as possible, whilst still in some ways challenging yourself to make your opening sequence as good as possible.
Here is a video with some annotations about how we did our preliminary task in order to create continuity as best as possible and do what we could with what we have.
The preliminary task helped us to learn that the best way to plan and produce a film is to:
- Choose a film with a plausible location, that is readily available and easy to get to
- Make sure all the shots are planned carefully and with some variety between them, so that they all look professional and also add variety into the sequence
- Always shoot a master shot just incase you want to cut back and forth between it
- Make sure you have thought of everything in advance and completed the storyboard, shot list, shoot schedule and script in order to make sure everything runs smoothly. This includes booking all your actors and making sure they know where to be when!
Everything we learnt from our preliminary task went on to help us with our opening sequence:
1. Due to poor lighting in our preliminary task, we agreed on a location indoors would be preferable as this meant we could control lighting much more easily, and it also meant the weather would not affect our shoot. We decided to film in my basement, and emptied out the complete room, but bought a cheap sofa, and scattered empty beer bottles and ashtrays around to create the desired mise en scene.
2. We had a test shoot, in which we also took pictures in order to create an animatic of our opening sequence. On the day we tested lighting, with and without filters, with and without strobe to see what would create our desired effect best. We also developed the script and handed it out to the actors with a list of what to wear to make sure they came prepared on the day. Everything was thought of in advance, to make sure everything ran as smoothly as possible on the day of the shoot.
3. Our group met at my house at 10am and we asked the actors to arrive at 11am. This gave us time to get up the lights, camera and decide on any last minute details. When they arrived we did make up and gave all the actors food to keep them happy. We shot all shots from different lengths, frames and angles to ensure we had a lot of variety to choose from when it came to editing. For example, we did the point of view shots with the strobe on and with the strobe off so we had a choice of which to use.
4. During post-production, after we had all our footage, we alotted times where each person would do editing during free periods, so that in lessons we could work on the blog together, because it is difficult for 4 people to edit at one time. We did not make changes to the sequence until everyone agreed with them and many changes and developments were made to our sequence from our shotlist and storyboard, because it made the story more realistic, immersive and continous. We also got feedback from a few target audience members as we were editing to help improve our opening.
5. Working as a team was easy because we are all friends with eachother, and listened to everyones ideas for inspiration, some which were used and others which were not. Everyone had an impact on our opening sequence and the fact we were able to share ideas with eachother made planning and developing our sequence run very smoothly.
6. Our final opening sequence was one we were all very happy with, and matched the mise en scene we had been planning for. Although there were a few problems along the way, we managed to produce a final product we were all pleased with.
A few problems encountered...
- We did not check all our equipment properly for shoot 1 and ended up with our camera running out of battery before we were done filming. We had no spare battery or charger and had to move some of the filming to a different day, but fortunately only the shots involving our group had to be done on another day.
- We also had a few technical problems with lighting and bad shadows due to not enough practice with how to light the set properly, however we all tried our best and the end result was a success!
No comments:
Post a Comment