Saturday 20 November 2010

Editing Process

As we needed to film again and the cameras weren’t available until the second week of editing we had to use the small amount of footage we had and edit it. The footage was used for a cutaway and once that had been edited how we wanted we focused on the title sequence. Our short film is called ‘I hate boys’ which has a girly feel to it. Because of this we wanted to do a school theme title sequence and I had an idea to do a stick boy and stick girl. The titles actually took quite long because we had to get the right dimensions for both of the stick people on Photoshop and then as we wanted it to be animated, we had to individually save each letter of the title as a JPEG then put it all together in Final Cut Pro as an animation.

Once we had completed our second filming I felt relieved because we could finally get stuck into it. The short film is one long scene of the protagonist walking through the park so to make it visually interesting; we edited several short shots at different angles to make the shot seem continuous. Trying to get the continuity perfect was quite difficult because when we were filming we didn’t consider little things like the tripod or an old man in the background. This meant some of our really nice shots couldn’t be used because the continuity wouldn’t match.
Lucy wasn’t in so I completed the sequence, trying to focus on the continuity and making sure the visual matched the length of the voiceover. I was happy with the end product although it had changed from our original idea of a layered shot with the protagonist appearing twice in the shot. Even though we had the footage of the layered shot, I felt that it didn’t work once we were in the editing process.

When Lucy was back she was happy with how the short film was completed and so during the lesson we just tightened up the shots making it perfect. Some of the earlier shots were too white due to a problem with the iris so we spent the majority of the lesson using the colour corrector to try and make it look more professional.

Thursday 11 November 2010

PowerPoint



Filming Process

As I was going on holiday for the majority of the two-week half term and was returning on Thursday 27th we planned to film everything on friday 28th and Saturday 29th. 

Friday we had planned to film a cutaway where the actors are at the bus stop. We wanted it to be filmed in the early evening to show that they were going out to a club/party. However as a group our actors could only film in the morning so we improvised and changed the scene to them in a bedroom getting dressed to go out. This actually worked much better and filming went smoothly.

Saturday we were supposed to film the main scene of our protagonist walking through the park. However an hour before filming was due to take place she told me that she wouldn't be able to make it so we arranged to film on Sunday 4.00

By the time we were all set to film on Sunday it had got too dark and we didn't want to simply film for the sake of it and lower the quality of the film. We had to rebook the camera out but could only get a baby HD. This was actually more suitable for our film as the majority of the filming was handheld and the baby HD was easier to hold steady. 

When we started filming we couldn't get the microphone to work and we were panicking because it was starting to get dark so we just decided to film without and use a voiceover instead which we hope will work well in the editing process.

Filming went very well, as it was the basic shot of our protagonist walking through the park we shot it from several different angles. The layered shot that we were worried about was filmed easily enough and we did a few shots of these then went back to my house to film the rest of the cutaways.