First Filming Day

Hi!

After the Christmas break we decided that we’d take a day off of school in January to film the entirety of our opening of an action film. Although we got a lot of shots recorded that day, most of which we used in our actual final film, we made a few mistakes which led to us having to re film using a second film day. During this first filming day, we had both strengths and weaknesses to our filming and choice of shots etc.

Strengths:

·     Amount of shots: Overall on this day we managed to film all of the film and we ultimately used around ¾ of the shots that we recorded. Seeing as this was the first time any of us had created a short film/film opening we handled the occasion reasonably well. Even with the lack of planning that we carried out we were able to come up with good shots that were innovative and that fitted in really well when combined with the music and other shots that we used.

·         Behind the scenes footage: one of the main things that we wanted to do throughout the filming day was to film ourselves discussing what we wanted to do with shots and how we wanted to enhance the quality of each scene. As a result of this we managed to record good behind the scenes footage that we could use later in our evaluation.

Weaknesses:

·        Location: The location that we chose for our final scene in which Matt finally takes revenge on Conor and Jack was filmed in what was deemed a too public area. We had to dismiss the shots we had taken here because the police said that it would cause concern for onlookers and other members of the public. This meant that even if we thought we had finished shooting entirely we would have to at least re film those final shots.

·    The Gun: Jack unfortunately broke the gun that we had been planning to use right at the start of filming. We were unable to fix it with super glue and we all decided that it’d be fine to just use tape to mend it temporarily. However when we reviewed the shots that we’d used the gun for, we realised two things. Firstly the gun wasn’t exactly the right type for our modern day action movie and therefore we needed something more up to date. As well as this the tape had done nothing to improve the look of the gun and although not everyone noticed its broken parts we for sure did and thought we needed to re shoot the scenes that we had used it for.

·      Time management: although we managed to get all of the shots we wanted, we did have the whole day to film and we got distracted a lot. Our distraction led to our final scene being poorly shot in terms of lighting. Therefore we had to reschedule in order to re shoot those poor quality shots.

Overall the first filming day went reasonably well because of the fact it was poorly planned and we were making a film of this importance for the first time. Although we did have more weaknesses than strengths and this was probably down to the fact we were all novices in the film making department. Luckily we were able to review our failures in the first filming day and then correct them in the second filming day. 

See you soon!