Monday, 17 December 2012

Filming 12/12/2012

  On the 12th December we filmed all of the remaining footage needed. This was all of scene 1 and 3.  Myself, Fraser, Clarice and our actor, Jimmy met at half past 9 to collect the equipment from stores before catching the 9:55am bus with Amy to Killamarsh. When we arrived, Me and Fraser filmed an establishing shot of the house while Clarice set up the bedroom to be ready for the bedroom scenes.
  For the indoor lighting change element needed in our film, we chose to create a seamless transition from night to day by using our inspiration from the film 'Matilda'. The rest of the group wanted to simply open the blinds to demonstrate this effect, however, I felt that it was too staggered and didn't look smooth enough. Because of this, I pushed for the use of a kino flow 400. In the end, I managed to convince them and we created the shot by altering both the blinds and the brightness of the kino. Clarice opened the blinds whilst Fraser changed the brightness of the light and I opened the kino's barn doors. Overall, I think that this gave us a great effect and portrayed exactly what we wanted to.


  As Clarice had storyboarded scene 1, she did the camera set ups for this section of the shoot. After looking back at some of the shots, some do appear to be a little under-exposed, however we were rushed for time so this could be a reason. When she was filming her sections, I tried to be as helpful as I could. For example, I helped control the dog for the bed sequence as it was difficult to get him to do exactly what we wished. I stood out of shot next to the bed with a treat for the bed to entice him to come towards Jimmy. However, it was obvious he was eating in the scene. We solved this problem by showing the dog that Jimmy had a treat in his hand before starting filming, this made him run straight towards the actor, which is what we wanted.
  Other sections of the scenes that we filmed was James as he makes a cup of tea and leaves to walk his dog. We gained a nice long take of this sequence that will help go towards this specified element in the brief. I like this take as it has two dimensions - James in the foreground as he makes his tea, juxtaposed with almost a separate set up to the right of the screen where he walks out of the door in the 'background':





The next part of the shoot was scene 3. As I had completed the shot list and storyboard for this scene, I set up the shots and filmed them. Below is a copy of my pre-production documents:









  I used the dolly and track to film a nice shot of James throwing a stick for the dog to chase after. Unintentionally, this gave us a really nice lighting change as the sun came into shot just as I panned towards the dog running away from the camera. I really like this image as the dog becomes silhouetted, presenting an overall nice picture.



Another shot that I really liked was a close-up of the stick that the dog would then pick up. It was hard to set up as we needed to place the stick down for the dog to see and hold him back. However, it came out really nice and I think the frost on the grass gave a nice effect.



  We had problems with the camera for this half of the shoot. I think it was due to the sheer coldness of he weather as the batteries kept continually running out of power. We had to work around this by warming one battery up whilst filming about 30 seconds of footage before that one ran out and swapping them. This was incredibly inconvenient as a planned shot for this scene was a long take to be edited into a time lapse. It ideally needed to be 10 minutes long but we had to settle with 3 minutes due to the problems. Towards the end it got ridiculous as the camera barely gave me time to focus the images before filming. We had to abandon the rest of the shoot, leaving out some of the shots I wanted because there was nothing we could have done. Both batteries said that they had at least an hour and a half of footage remaining . Overall, I wish I had more time to film all of the footage I had planned, however, after looking back at the footage, I am happy with how it turned out.




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