Filming and Editing the Preliminary Exercise

I was looking forward to the start of filming because I've never done anything like this before. We had a set time and place to meet, which we all did. We were also supposed to meet the actors there but because we wanted to go down to the TV Studio and start, I sent them both a text asking them to meet us there as soon as they were ready. Not long later I found out that one actors was at home but they said they were going to come in for filming and our other actor hadn't bothered to tell us that they were ill and weren't in college at all. Although we were down an actor, we had to carry on getting ready for filming. So whilst we were all helping to get the scene ready to film, we were trying to get another actor. In the end, we had one of the actors turn up and Rhiannon managed to get her friend to fill in for the Warren (the other actor). Because we now had a female and a male instead of two males, we were able to go to our original idea of having a female dominant character over a male, and play around with the usual male dominance stereotype. So in a way it was good that Warren didn't come in, because we were able to be more creative with the piece. However next time we've decided to have extra actors with us, in case some people are ill, or again didn't turn up. Also because we didn't get Emily (The replacement) until the last minute, we had to ditch the dress code we had planned on.

Preparing for filming wasn't too bad other then that. The main difficulties of it were things like adjusting the lights. We weren't able to do this ourselves because we never have before and we had health and safety hazards to consider too, so our lecturer Lee was going to help us with that. Unfortunately Lee was in a meeting during the time when we were setting up and instead of delaying our production anymore then finding another actor did, we asked another teacher from the media block to help us. He also gave us some advice as to how we could set the scene, but we decided to keep it how we planned, we did leave the table and two chairs how he positioned them though. After he'd gone, we then sat our actors at the table to see how the lighting worked through the camera, we also used abit of time to get used to turning the lights up and down. This proved useful during the filming period because we had to change the lighting in places because the camera was getting a glare and it made our scene look hazy and blurred, we didn't want this effect in the final piece.

Some other things we had to do before filming was make sure we weren't seeing anything through the camera that we shouldn't have, that could therefore affect the continuity of the clip. There were some wires near the door that didn't look right, so we place a black board in front of them, this helped to blend the black background, however we lost alot of the black brick effect that we really like when room searching by doing this. Also there was a sign which you see as Emily walks in the door. First of all we tried to remove this but it was glued up, so we looked at it through the camera and the words didnt seem to be very distinguishable. Later during the editing process we realised that the writing was easier to read, however, this was unavoidable. We couldn't have stopped this without ripping it off the wall, which we clearly aren't allowed to do.

Finally, before we started to actually film, when we had the lights etc how we wanted them, we tested out all the different shot through the camera, e.g. the ots of Emily walking through the door. Then we were ready to start filming. During filming we did a few takes for each shot and watched the first couple so we knew the camera and sound were working fine. We ended up having to play about with how bright the lights were in the filming process because we found that the camera was getting a glare from the light in places and at other times it was too dark, leaving it hard to see the characters.

When we were actually filming i felt more relaxed and as the director i made what i thought clear, but not in a way that i overpowered the others in my group. We decided that we work well as a democracy and put our idea's through one another before going ahead with things. Also we were quite lucky about when we chose to film aswell, we filmed on wednesday afternoon when college is at it's least busyiest, so we only had Lee (our lecturer) coming in and out.

After we'd finished filming we watched over all our takes on the camera to make sure they were ok before we started to put things back and let our actors go. Everything seemed alright though, so "it was a wrap". The following lesson we had planned to edit and check the audio of our work. This lesson didnt go as planned though because we didnt film onto a tape, instead, we filmed onto a hard drive because we thought it would be easier. It was a good idea at first, but when we went to upload them onto movie maker for editing, we discovered that there was a problem with the codex(spelt wrong). So because we were unable to edit like was planned, we used that lesson to decided on our final shots for the final piece, because we could still open them with windows. We used some more of that lesson to write our previous blogs to this one.

It started to look up the next lesson because David brought in his laptop for the editing process. He also has moviemarker on his laptop and he checked it before, so because it worked fine we thought it would be best to use that for editing. As Hayley was our editor, she did all the editing for our piece, but then when she was done as a group we watched it over a few times and pointed out the places where we thought the edits could be a bit tighter or looser. So Hayley did as we ask and if we didnt like the change Hayley would sort it out again.

When we'd finished editing we just had a few things left to do. Rhiannon and David watched the clip over and wrote the final script for us and Hayley and me sat and wrote notes on our final edit. We both did separate notes for the edit, so that way we had a range. Rhiannon and David did the script together because Rhiannon is our scriptwritter and David was able to pick out any bits she'd missed.

Over all i'm happy with how we did the filming and editing, but we've also learnt for next time what we can improve on and the places where we may slack a little. It's definately been a good learning process for our final production.



This is a copy of our final edit of the preliminary excercise from youtube.