G321: Filming Diary

  

15/3/2011

 

Our first day of filming was very successful and we worked very well and efficiently together. We arrived at our location: a bank office in Chelmsford town, and we were very efficient when setting up all of our props and camera equipment. We all brought different props with us and brought along our storyboard, so that we could look at how we imagined the set to look and could place all of the props in the correct places. We made sure that our actress had the right costume and helped to style her in the way we imagined her to look.

 

Setting upprops on desk

 

Setting up props



 


Working on costume with our actress

 

Setting up the props



When we were setting up our equipment we came across some problems. One main problem was the size of our tri-pod as it was not as tall as we had expected and did not have a spirit level on the top to tell us if the camera was straight. Therefore to resolve this, we had to stand our tri-pod on a small coffee table to get it to the height we needed and we had to use all three of us to use the camera: one two to hold the tri-pod at an angle that was straight and one to be in charge of using the camera itself. This meant that filming some of the shots was more time-consuming that we had hoped but we did manage to work very efficiently in spite of this. Another problem that we had was framing our shots. To get a full long shot, we had to move the tri-pod out of the door peering in on the room to create a successful long shot. This did actually work very well as we managed to get the shot we needed without any huge problems.



Our Camera stood on a small Coffee table



Our camera through the doorway



Although we had our shot-list with us, we did not entirely stick to it as we had some issues with the camera equipment. This therefore meant that we had to pay careful attention to which shots we had filmed to ensure that we didnt miss any out along the way. Our shot list showed that we should have filmed in the following order:

Setting up Props

1) Long shot of desk

2) Second Long shot of desk

3) Tracking shot of desk

4) Second tracking shot of desk

5) Close up of computer screen

6) Over the shoulder shot

7) Close up of characters eyes

8) Ariel shot of character's handbag

This was because we had ordered the shots by the typoe of shot they were however our difficulties meant that we needed to film it this order instead:



Filming the shot of the desk



1) Long shot of desk

2) Second long shot of desk

3) Ariel shot of phone

4) Close up of characters eyes

5) Over the shoulder shot
6) Close up of computer screen

7) Tracking shot of desk

8) Second tracking shot of desk




Filming the hand-held tracking shot



Mostly, once we had overcome the problems with the camera equipment, our filming of each shot went fairly smoothly however there were one or two shots that we still had a lot of difficulty with. The first difficult shot was the shot of the phone ringing. We has issues with the sound in particular with this shot. Because of our location, outside the office was a main road and it was difficult not to pick up the sound of the cars passing by when we filmed this. Therefore we decided to film this shot a number of times to make sure that we had choice of the best shot when we are ready to edit. Another shot that was particularly difficult was the tracking shots. This was because we were filming them hand-held adn it was difficult to keep the camera steady. Another problem with these shots was the timings as we had to make sure that our actress did things in sync with the camera as well as having a steady speed ready for us to edit.

When filming, we all equally contributed to the work and worked very efficiently together. We managed to film all of our shots in one session which meant that our time management was very successful as our filming schedule actually stated that we were planing on filming over two days rather than one.

Joanna