The Preliminary Task- Filming

Lesson 3- 26/1/10

In today's lesson my group and I were ready to film our preliminary task. We started by making sure that our tape was working properly and that we were not recording over someone else's work. We also collected a tripod to assist with some camera shots and angles. This would help when panning a camera shot or help a shot/reverse shot. I was the one who was appointed to film as Sam and Robert was to appear in the short sequence, this is what we had previously planned.

Before we filmed each shot we would leave 5 seconds before we started recording to give flexibility in editing. Our first shot was to be a pan from right to left in the L-shaped corridor seeing the actor Robert walking towards a door. But when we started filming we had to make sure that we left a gap at the beginning of the recording to avoid any glitches in the tape. We encountered a few problems of lining the camera up so we could film Robert smoothly, Sam helped me to make sure that I had filmed the shot correctly. We also made sure that we used the right props, to give the right impression to the audience. We then moved on to the next camera shot from our storyboard.

As the next shot was a close up of Robert's hand on a door handle, to him opening the door, this went according to plan. When filming the rest, the location would be in a quiet and dark classroom that would be appropriate and free, to make a more eerie atmosphere we used an artificial light. This took a few trials to get the lighting right to make the scene happen. This was done by Sam and Robert who adjusted the artificial lighting until I was satisfied for the benefit of the group. This was used to cast shadows across the actors to give a sinister impression, but came across a complication. When reviewing what we had filmed for that hour and a half we noticed that in some shots that were filmed the lighting was well lit in some shots and in others unfortunately was not as lit causing unnecessary silhouettes. This was due to the location and the where the artificial lighting was placed within each shot was obviously placed wrong and needed to be moved. The other camera shots that we used were: close-up, two shot, shot reverse shot and over the shoulder shot.

Next lesson my group and I would start to edit what we had filmed, and finally complete it to it's best.