First piece of coursework - planning and filming

After we finished story-boarding and had decided on what we were going to film we were ready to start filming and almost nearly knew what we were doing. Well, we would have been ready had it not been for a couple of lower school bunkers; trying to work out how the tripod worked and being hairstyle critics. Once they had established who had bad hair and who had good hair we decided it was time to try and start filming...only to find that the camera was dead so had to go and get another one. Pudders gladly stepped in to go and change the camera.

On his return the 2 girls clicked that we were quite boring and unenthusiastic about what they has to say, so left us to go and interrogate the group downstairs. We then filmed josh walking down the corridor, but all the rooms down the N corridor were full so we planned to do that scene the next lesson.

This corridor was still full the next lesson, but we managed to find and empty room; miss Percival's and she kindly allowed us to film in there.

So much time had been put into the storyboard but we had no script.  No problem though, nothing we couldn't sort; we simply borrowed someone else's. The script from Frankenstein to be precise. This added an unintentional melodramatic flare, which meant it took many takes to get our actors to get all the way through their lines without laughing. But in the end it was to good effect. Then for continuity we filmed the walking shots again in the S corridor.

Editing

Editing was made a bit confusing at first by Visual Studio 8 but in the end Jeremy and i got the hang of it. Our group of 4 was split in 2 an we both edited the same footage. Capturing was easy, plug the camera in and press capture. Then set in and out points on the film to cut out different clips and simply drag them into the timeline in order. Then we had to cut out defects and sound pops. We got quite far and then noticed that Josh had not closed the door on entering the room but when he sat down it was closed. So we recorded the sound of a door closing and added it on top, cutting out him not closing the door. 

It took a while to work out how to do a fade to black, and we found out how to fade to a peacock before! but then josh showed us where we could find a black slide.

After comparing ours with the product of the rest of our group we realised how much music makes a difference. They have a melodic, sorrowful piano playing in the background, with a dramatic crescendo on the last line. Yet ours, with exactly the same footage, at the time had the kind of music you'd find on a children's' program, and it could have been exactly that. But the music had to go unfortunately as it was inappropriate.