Upon setting out to film we found our first challenge – time, availability and organisation. It was very difficult to find time to film when everyone was free, in order to overcome this we had to film the actors individually, and improvise when people simply couldn’t be present at filming – this even meant using a ‘stunt double’ and ‘hand model’ to stand in for actors in certain scenes. Overall I think that we worked well to improvise and work with the little time that we had. Another issue with our filming was that some of the shots that we chose to film ‘hand held’ appeared to be more unstable than anticipated, even with stability mode switched on the camera. Next time in order to combat this I would film less zoomed in and then crop the frame down to the desired focus in editing. As well as this we found it very difficult to successfully film a tracking shot of the actress walking forwards, this came across strongly in our final production and in future I would consider using a ‘dolly’ for the tripod in order to capture these shots.
When it came to the editing process there were also a few problems that we faced. The most frustrating probably was the way the software would ‘glitch out’ causing clips to disappear off the track – erasing at times a whole hour’s worth of work. In order to resolve this problem we spent our lunchtimes and free periods in the classroom making up for lost time, and regularly saving and checking our track. In future it would be worth leaving ourselves more time before the deadline to make final touches to our production, this includes adding more transitions both video and audio, applying filters perhaps, as well as adding a title and credits scene to our film. Another benefit of having more time would be being able to render in a higher quality, our final film was rendered in 480p and would have been even better if rendered in 1080p, however I didn’t think this too much of a problem as we had filmed with a high quality camera.
To conclude, although we faced problems and imperfection along the way, this was to be expected with any filmmaking process especially for first year students, and so I was really pleased with the final result – we worked well as a team and achieved all that we set out to do. It had a variety of different camera shots, we put careful thought into the mise-en-scene of every frame and we carried through the desired aesthetic we wished for in order to meet the conventions of the two themes of our film – romance and horror, this further was shown with our use of soundtrack. This film was generally a success receiving high praise from friends and family, as well as accumulating over 400 views on YouTube in just 2 days. Overall it was a rewarding and enjoyable experience and I have learnt a lot to consider for future filmmaking tasks.
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