09/10/09

Today we did our filming that we planned in the previous lesson. I think it was generally successful, but the storyline didn't come out as clearly as planned. We had to fill in a form to say where we'd be and at what time so that our teacher could come and find us, so we had to decide where in particular we wanted to shoot each clip there and then. When we left we headed for our first place of filming, which we needed extra people for, but when we got to the area, which was an alley behind a store, we found that there was barely any people around, so we had to improvise and instead filmed the shot in the college grounds and used some students who were willing to help. We had originally planned to get our high angle shot from being on a high floor of a multistorey car park and filming downwards, but as this was no longer possible we again had to improvise, so Charlie stood on a wall and filmed downwards to get the same sort of effect. We had also planned for this shot to be filmed in black and white to give the impression of a CCTV camera's footage, so it would make more sense. We ended up filming everything in the college grounds because it was easier and because all the shots led on from one another. We had some other problems too, such as not having anything to represent blood, so we improvised by using tomato sauce. Also we had planned to use a slow motion feature at the end of the film, but we realised this feature was not available on the camera's we were using, so instead we got the actor to just re-enact slow motion moving during the clip. Another issue we had with the camera/equipment was that we couldn't set shots in to black and white, which we needed to give the impression of CCTV, so the story was easier to understand. Without this the storyline is not as straight forward as we would have hoped, also because we weren't allowed to delete shots we couldn't get the filming exactly as planned.
We got all the filming finished in about 90 minutes, and got it pretty much exactly as we planned, apart from sound effects that were out of our control, such as a lorry reversing and people shouting, but as we weren't allowed to delete clips this was just how it was. We didn't use a tripod because we wanted the whole film to be quite personal and to use hand-held shots throughout. I think the whole thing went smoothly and to plan and that there wasn't much we could have done to improve it, because it went nearly exactly as planned.