We found it really hard to keep to our original production schedule as often when we had dates set to film people realised they had other engagements such as family parties and work. Because of this I feel our film is not to the best of our abilities as a lot of it ended up being rushed. Below are a few entries which I posted on my previous blog about how filming went after it had been done.
Saturday 29th October 2011
On the 28th of October myself, Hannah and Megan went to Megan's to film the prelim task and the opening cradle shot of our movie. However it didn't work out too well.
Whilst we were filming we encountered a few problems. These included; our friends who we had asked to act in the film being disruptive and we also found Megan's brother was too. In the background of a lot of the shots you can either hear or see them. Therefore when we next film we have decided to act in it ourselves to eliminate any distractions.
We managed to film these two shots quicker than anticipated so we then decided to move on to the next shot, however it was raining outside and this is where we needed to shoot so we decided against it.
When we got back to school and watched the footage through, we realised that the fact we had not used a tripod was obvious. The filming was shaky and did not look professional. We have taken this on board and next time we will use a tripod.
Tuesday 27th December 2011
On the 22nd of December we finally got round to re-filming parts of our prelim task and filming our main video. We found it a lot easier this time as we were more organised and had less distractions.
We went round Megan's in the afternoon as it got dark and started to film re-film parts of our prelim. This was considerably easier than filming our main task as we had previously filmed it but decided we didn't like it, therefore we knew what we were doing.
Filming the main task was a lot harder and took quite a long time. Some problems we came across were:
- Lack of costumes - we couldn't find a mask or a black cape
- The lighting outside was limited and although it added to the scariness it also made what was on screen hard to see
- Lack of props - we couldn't hang the crib we had from a tree as it was too heavy
- Shadows of the person holding the camera whilst outside
We tried to deal with these problems as well as we could. The person who was filming (mainly Hannah) moved around and found a position where her shadow couldn't be seen onscreen even if it meant using a different shot to the one we had drawn up on our storyboard. Costume-wise we found a black coat and I wore that over my head instead of a shawl, I also turned my back to the camera so that my face wasn't visible as we wanted the killer's identity to be kept secret during the opening sequence.
The lighting we couldn't really do much about, we had Megan's garden lights and kept those on throughout shooting. We also tried to use torches for extra light however they didn't make a huge amount of difference. Because we couldn't hand the crib from the tree, in the end we just tied the baby around a rope swing. I think it looked slightly unrealistic however in the limited amount of time we had this was our best idea.
Once we finished filming I took the camera home and I am now editing the shots into our final pieces of iMovie.
Sunday 15th January 2012
After editing all of our film together we decided that we were not happy with how it had turned out.
Shots were still shaky, we were missing a lot of the original costumes and props and the music wasn't as effective as we thought it would be therefore we decided to re-film what we could on Saturday the 14th of January. Unfortunately Megan had work therefore she was not able to attend this filming session which meant that we weren't able to re-film the crib scene as it the crib was at her house. Also she was acting as the babysitter which now meant that I had to play this role.
This filming session was extremely successful as Hannah and I spent a good few hours making sure that the shots were exactly how we wanted them. For each shot we tried a variety of different angles with different lighting etc so that when it came to editing we would have a lot to select from.
After filming we both sat down at my laptop and edited the film together on iMovie. When I edited the prelim I did it alone and would have liked to have had the other members of my group there for help and a second opinion so this was really beneficial having Hannah here to help.
After Hannah had left I was watching through the film again and felt that the editing could still be even better so I am now currently slightly changing the editing of the final piece. Once I have done this I will send it to Hannah and Megan to get their opinions.
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