Continuity Task - Day 1

Day 1 - First Filming Session:

The other day we had our first go at filming and getting to grips with the cameras, technology and tri-pods. We had to get used to the equipment and learn how to use it all before we went ahead in our first task of filming our continuity editing tasks. This was because none of us knew how to setup the camera or the tri-pod. After this we then went on to filming our scenes using what we know about editing and filming. Furthermore after we finished filming we then had to be shown how to take the raw footage off the camera and put on to the computer ready to edit in Premiere Pro. We then looked back at our footage and realised a lot of it wasn't what we expected as we now knew it was much harder than we thought it would be. We then knew we would have to re shoot a lot of the scenes or in fact the entire movie as what we had filmed was not up to a good enough standard. This made us realise how hard it really was and how much effort we would have to put into completing this task at a high standard to meet the target grades.

Problems We Faced
Some of the problems we faced during our first shoot were:

• availability of actors and location - this was hard as we had to film our scenes in the school and we wanted to base our scene in the cafe, however this was a very busy place and luckily it wasn't too busy at the time and we luckily manages to acquire some willing actors to take part.
• gathering of actors - we had to find people willing to take part in our filming as some people were shy and some people were busy at the time.
• lighting, due to our time schedule in the day - for example on the day it was especially bright and we had our scene based by one of the tables which was by the window and we then had to put down the blinds to stop the sun from getting in to our shots, however this still didn't provide the best lighting
• noise, because was set in a busy cafe in our school - this was extremely annoying and impossible to control as it was a public cafe in the school where there were other people in their leisure talking etc. and this was leaked into the clips.
• our knowledge of use of the equipment. e.g. zooming, positioning, tripod set up etc. - this we found hard as we didn't have any knowledge on the use of any of the technology

Solutions

Some of the ways we got past our problems:

•  We managed to find willing actors that were free and could participate in our task, and we managed to re-shoot scenes that we needed around their schedule and meet up when they were free to get the shots we needed.
• For the lighting we decided to put the blinds down to reduce the light which helped the lighting however we couldn't control it well.
• Noise level was impossible to control and we couldn't do much about it but we tried to film at times when there wasn't much talking.
• We then found out how to use the equipment properly and slowly learnt what was the proper things to do by getting shown and getting used to the technology.