Evaluations of filming and planning

Equipment list & shooting plans:

Video camera, Tripod, Plain tracksuit, cigarette, lighter, sign saying ‘mental institute’.

We will need the video camera in order to film the shots. The tripod will be used to take steady filming shots and also it will be used for panning shots. The plain tracksuit will be used for the characters outfit. The lights will be used just in case it gets too dark whilst filming, the boxes link in with this as we can put the lights on the boxes for something to rest them on. The cigarette is used in the first shot along with the lighter as the character is lighting up a cigarette. Finally, we will be making a sign that says ‘mental institute’ as it is one of the three flashbacks.

As we have flashbacks in our opening scene, the two parts will be filmed on difference days, or at different times during the same day. This going to be because the flashbacks are meant to be from earlier in the day when she ran away from the mental institution, therefore they need to be filmed in the daylight.

We will be filming the flashbacks next Saturday which will be the 7^th of December, at 12:30am, this means it will be daylight when we film. We will spend 2 hours on this.
We will be filming the alleyway scenes next Saturday, 7^th of December around half 5, therefore it will be dark when we come to film. We will spend 3 hours on this.

The people involved will be me and Cliona, Cliona will be the one being filmed and I will be the one filming. However when we film the flashbacks, Cliona will film some of the flashbacks such as feet running and the mental institution so that she will also get a chance to film.

We decided that as Cliona needs to film too, we will be using my sister as the character of the film so that we both can do an equal amount of filming.


Risk assessment:

·        Equipment being knocked in the dark (lights, camera, tripod)

Severity of risk = 4/10

·        Loose wires if there is any.

Severity of risk = 6/10

·        Forgetting the equipment/equipment such as camera not being charged.

Severity of risk = 10/10

·        Tripod not working.

Severity of risk = 4/10

·        Someone knocking the camera.

Severity of risk = 4/10

·        Accident or injury.

Severity of risk = 9/10

·        Public walking in shots.

Severity of risk = 3/10

Evaluation of first attempt at filming

For our first attempt at filming last Saturday we brought a camera and tripod from the school and took it back to my house.
When we got the camera and the tripod to the house we were struggling to find good places which we could film so we spent a long time trying to figure out where we were going to film, therefore by the time we left it was getting dark.
However, we didn’t think that by the time we got there it would be as dark as it was. As we were using a canon camera, we didn’t know how to get it so that we could film in a night setting, so that it would be lighter. Therefore the camera was too dark and we couldn’t see what we were filming on the camera.

Therefore, as we couldn’t film the flashbacks, we also couldn’t film the alleyway scenes as you couldn’t see anything even when we used lights with the camera.

To solve this problem, we are going to be filming next Friday after school, this means that we can be in school and use the equipment if we don’t have the correct equipment with us.
To solve the problem of the lighting, we will be in school therefore we can use their lighting which will be better that the lights we have at home. And to deal with the time problem, we will be filming it all during the day so that the camera won’t be too dark and we will be able to get some shooting completed.
We were planning to film it at night in the school using artificial lighting outside to make it slightly brighter, however we realised that it was too difficult to be able to get the lighting outside.

Therefore instead I decided that we could film during the daylight straight after school, and during editing, we can darken the exposure to make it look as if it has been filmed at night. Therefore we have changed the date of our filming to being Friday the 13th and we will be filming it after school at 3:15, this means that it should still be light.

Our shooting schedule for the first attempt at filming:

Evaluation at the second attempt of filming:

The second time we filmed it was December 13th. We decided we would do this filming after school, and shoot it at school so that we know we have done it straight after, otherwise if we went home to film it would be too dark by the time we got home. For this time of shooting we used a tripod and a canon camera.

When we came to film, we managed to get all of the shots, however, the shots didn't seem long therefore our opening scene would be short if we used these shots. We also came across the problem that Cliona needed to film, instead of being in the film, therefore we could't use these shots as she wouldn't of had any input if we did.

There was also the problem we came across when we later viewed the footage as we saw that it was too dark to be visible, and the shots could've been lightened in editing but they still wouldn't look as natural or good as we wanted. 

From this time we filmed we learnt that we need to film in the daylight instead as we decided it would be hard to film when it was just getting dark in the afternoon. Therefore to fix this, we decided that the next time we came to film we would we would film in the morning at the weekend instead so that we know we definitely have shots.

We were going to have the shots done in the present set at night/dark and the shots from the past done in the daylight. However as this was found hard to do we needed to come up with a different way of showing that these two different shots aren't from the same time period. Therefore we changed the original plan so that we would have the flashbacks in black and white and the normal shots in daylight, therefore the audience can decipher one shot from one period of time from another. 

Our shooting schedule for the second attempt at filming:

Evaluation on the third attempt at filming:

We filmed our opening scene of our film, on the 5^th of December. To film we had to use an old storyboard as the new one had to still be created due to the amount of changes we had made recently to it. We used a canon camera to film, and a tripod for the panning.

The filming went well and we managed to get all of the shots that we wanted, however the present shots were meant to be done in the night, but as we realised that would be to hard to do, we decided to film it during the day along with flashbacks.

Some problems that occurred whilst filming was the lack of storyboard, and was hard to remember what scene had to come next with only a rough copy, some of the shots are blurry as well, which would have been better if we took each shot twice to make sure that we got one that was decent. However, apart from that, all of the shots were completed and we had all the equipment we needed, this attempt at filming had been better than our other two as we realised what we had missed from the last two attempts at filming so by the third attempt we knew what mistakes not to make.

I have now begun to edit the shots we have, by cropping them and have started to add the flashbacks in between the scenes, none of the shots were too dark which meant I didn’t have to brighten any using colour balance. The person I am working with told me that the best idea is to make the flashback in black and white so that we know what is in the present and what is a flashback.

Whilst editing the film I wasn’t sure of how we were planning to do the voice overs, therefore after asking someone, they said the best way to do it was to delete the soundtrack already attached to the film and use the voice recorder that’s on final cut.

To of made the filming better we could’ve remade the storyboard or had better planning to what we could’ve done, however we did manage to get all the scenes done with that said we could’ve been more organised with the planning side.

Our shooting schedule at the final/third attempt at filming: