Friday, 4 February 2011

Our Preliminary Film - Experiencing the equipment and editing software

Before going ahead to do our main production - we do some preliminary filimg to create a short film so we could get used to the equipment and using Final Cut Pro on the Mac's.

Our intended story line was surrounding two best friends (Noellia and Keir) talking about Keir's date at the cinema the previous night and he is anxiously waiting for a call back from the girl.

We started the filming with Keir and Noellia walking across the road from outside the Church over to College and through the gates. We wanted to practice a variety of shots following people walking in preparation for our intended final piece which we would need them for. So we did a panning shot following them across the road and we filmed that in three different shots - Long shot, medium shot and close up so we had more flexibile options in editing. We used the medium shot and the close up shot in the final piece for the panning walk across the road. The problem arose that the traffic flowing was going to be different in every shot - so we had to cut the editing to either side of the road, missing out them crossing so we could make it all connect seamlessly. The panning shots were a bit quick or slow at times in the shots so we weren't always in time with Noellia and Keir walking in the shots - but in the final edit, we think it works well with the variety we used.

We did a steady zoom out to follow to Noellia and Keir walking through to gate toward the camera and with the use of continuity editing - we did a zoom in following them from the same position the shot ended through the door to one of the buildings on college campus. We kept the camera rolling as they walked in the building to show them walking around the corner from a distance which we could use for continuity in the next shot inside the building showing them turning the same corner. The problem with the final version of the prelim filming is the zoom we did looks very amateurish and would never be seen in a real production.
When they were walking in to the cantene having turned the corner - Noellia and Keir were directed to sit down on the chairs and we would film them. However a classic filming mistake - we had them sitting down one way and then filmed the conversation from the other way - we didn't realise this until we sat down to begin editing. We tried to make it seem less obvious with the methods of shots used - but it was definitely a mistake we should have re-shot whilst filming.

We wanted to have different perspectives of the conversation from different angles - but with only one camera, we knew this would be a struggle. We initially filmed Noellia and Keir front on so we could see both of them clearly and then over both of their shoulders. We did this so we could use them in editing - giving us a variety of options. We were able to use shot reverse shots and two shots this way - allowing us to work with a variety in the editing. We found it really hard to get a decent zoom from Keir throwing the phone down to the screen - so we decided to film a 15 second shot of the call incoming itself - this way we were able to use an eyeline match, rather than an amateur zoom. The story behind the phone being thrown down is that Keir was hoping and expecting it would be the girl calling but it was instead his 'Mummy' - which we thought would be fun and cute.

We didn't want to leave the long walking shots boring and blank so we decided to add music over the top which in the end, we added to the full product. We used "Florence and the Machine - Dog Days" and we were able to make it work really well with the walking and the Blackberry incoming call from 'Mummy' at the end. We really struggled to choose appropriate music and spent 30-45 minutes searching for appropriate options and Noellia suggested this song we used and it worked great with it. The voices in the conversation didn't sound all too good on their own - so we reduced the volume to -21db so it was still playing faintly over the background and it seems to have worked fine with the conversation, but we would have preferred that scene to look much better. We them upped the volume to 3db over the final shots of the Blackberry and the credits with it slowly fading out over the final 8 seconds of the credits.

We created the credits using the "Scrolling Text" feature in the Final Cut Pro Effects - they work great for this prelim and we named ourselves "VEKS Productions" - Vicky, Emma (Noellia), Keir and Scales (Jason's surname) Productions. "VEKS" to us both looks and reads well to us and hopefully it will to others.



This is our final prelim video showing our story line of Keir and Noellia talking about Keir's date the night before and the girl not calling back. We had fun making and editing it - we feel good having taken a bunch of shots in a normal video camera to this final production and it being our first and now we've done our prelim and the editing associated with making it - we will hopefully be able to transfer that experience to making our final piece.

Jason,noelia,vicky and keir

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