Filming, 25th November 2008

After capturing and editing all our original footage from our first shoot at Jake's house, we realised that some of our shoots had some faults. For instance the breaking in scene where we force the door open looked very fake. There was also a scene where the dialogue sounded very fake and staged as well. We decided to go back to Jake's house and re-shoot these shots. This shooting went well, were added in an extra scene which was a close up of the hammer being wedged inside the door, we then re-filmed the shot we had previously done. These two shots combined made the whole scene look much more realisitic, and we feel it has massively improved the scene. We then had to re-shoot the scene where we are running through the house. We decided to put the dialogue slightly later in the scene and we also decided to change the type of camera movement...we made it more shaky which we feel helped to add to the tension. Overall, this re-filming really improved the scenes that we did re-shoot so although it did take up more time, it had a positive outcome. We did not come across any problems in this shoot, despite the fact that it was very dark, this would obivously have been a problem initially, but because we had filmed the rest of the film in the dark, it just matched up.

24th November 2008

In this shoot we had initialy planned that the sequence would go on for around 30 seconds and would be the climax of the sequence. However when we arrived at the location we had realised that it was no where big enough to take up the 30 seconds because it was only a small stretch of road and our plan was to run down it. After the first take we realised that it would only take around 5 seconds for them to run down it. We had orginally planned to do jump cuts for the sequence but again due to the size of the location it would have looked very awkward and fast if we did so. Instead I filmed out of my mums car as we drove alongside Jake and Nick to see them sprint down. After this I placed the camera at the top of the slope and filmed them both run down. This would allow us to have more footage and we would be able to make the scequence longer than 5 seconds. Also we filmed a scene when Jake and Nick had stopped running and went around a corner to hide. However due to the limitations of the camera the shot looked very dark and you could not make out what was going on very well.
We found out that light was quite a big issue again in this shoot because we did it straight after school and so it was still quite light. We knew it had to be darker because our other shoot was in virtually pitch black. The light did start to fade though and in the end the light was perfect because you could still make out what was going on and it was still dark enough to fit in with our other footage.

Editing

As we got our filming done early on and within the first couple of weekends available we were able to spend a lot of time editing and improving our sequence. When we first captured our film from our cam corder to the premier editing software we realised a few problems with our filming. We first captured the whole thing which were automatically split up into seperate clips. As we took many different takes of the same shot we had a lot of shots to look through. This was good as we had a choice of different shots so we were able to choose the one we thought would fit best into our sequence. We then tried to get a rough idea of how the shots would look together so we placed them onto our storyboard. We played it through and realised one, a lot of our shots were very dark and two, the beginning and ends of clips had to be taken out. So we spent a lot of time going through every clip cutting it to the write length and then putting it back into our story board in order. By doing this we got a sense of how long our sequence would be and what elese we had to do. Overall at this point the sequence came to about 1 minute 30 seconds so we had another 30 seconds for our end chase scene and title credits. We also changed the lighting on a lot of the shots to make them look more grainy on the internal shots and lighten up the external shots as they were very dark. We also realised we had to redo two of the scenes, as one of the scenes wasn't very convincing and there needed to be a longer gap between two other shots. We then went out and re filmed these two shots and also filmed are chase sequence. We then did the same with these two shots as we had with the earlier shots and replaced them in our storyboard. We then put in our title credits. We used a font which we believed comformed with our genre. We placed the names Nick Reilly and Jake Tomkins over close ups of our faces so the audience could establish who was who. We also placed Jack Clark's name over one of the clips of him in the car. We spent a lot of time going through different title pages and effects. Eventually we came to the conclusion, based on the title credits in the film 'Control', we had have a plain title screen with just the title 'The Come Up' flashing on and off becoming bigger on the screen. We believed this was very effective. Once watching our whole opening sequence through we realised something was missing, there had to be something in there which established the audience with at least one of the characters. We decided to use a shot of Jake sitting there and a voice over explaining his inner thoughts. By doing this it would enable the viewer to relate to this character and side with this character. We edited this sequence in at the beginning of the storyboard. After this we believed we had all of the shots we needed and ran for a sufficient amount of time. The only thing left to do was put in the music and get rid of the diagetic sound. Jake edited and looped the sound track to try and match the music with what was going on in the opening sequence. We then laid the soundtrack over the sequence. As in a lot of the scenes the diagetic sound is very load we had to mute these sounds and raise the volume of the bits which involved dailogue or sounds we found would add to our sequence.

Filming, 9th November 2008

This was on the same weekend as our first attempt, but luckily we were able to get a tape and so could still do this part of filming. It went quite well overall, at first we thought there would be a problem with the lighting however we were able to use artificial light effectively and in the end we were able to make it look good. We also plan to change the darkness of the shots in post film editing which should hopefully improve it further. During this editing, we are also going to have a look at changing the colour filtering because the indoor lighting we used made a lot of the shots look very pinky which doesn't suite the genre of the film. We were quite happy with the filming we got done in this session, and liked the camera work in a lot of the shots we did, for example this scenes using handicam worked well and helped to create tension in the scene. Although the filming went well, we found it much harder than we first anticipated, and in the end, very few of the shots were actually the same as the ones we planned in our storyboard.

Filming, 7th November 2008

We went out to film the latter part of our sequence on this day. We took out all the equipment and arrived at location at the arranged time. However, when we were setting up the equipment, we realised that we had forgotten the tape, and were unable to film on this day. This was our first real shooting experience and although it seemed like it had gone badly, we were able to obtain another tape, and we now know that we need to make sure we check everything before we go filming, which will help in the next few sessions of filming.

CF feedback background research

Excellent work. You have met all deadlines and this blog demonstrates that your research is clearly informing your creative process and that you are using ICT to collaborate as a group. I am particularly impressed by how your reccie has informed and improved your concept. The pitch was excellent – entertaining, well planned, informed by research into target audience, possible locations and generic conventions through film analysis. Your treatment was very convincing. Your storyboarding, scripting and location reccies show that you are carefully planning your work in advance of shooting.

Your planning mark currently stands at a level 4 - well done. There will be a slight variation in score due to differences in standard of film analysis, however this is the only area. As a group, you are working extremely well.

To achieve this overall, ensure that your time management and shoots are well organized and that all deadlines are met.

I’m looking forward to seeing how you carefully use location to establish the right “urban” tone!

Mrs Fernandez

Filming

After discussions in our group we have decided to try and get the majority of our filming done the first weekend. Due to work commitments and private commitments we have to try and get all the filming done friday after school and sunday evening. This could pose problems relating to light. But we are trying to link the filming on friday and sunday so we film at roughly the same time. If the light does cause us a large problem then we will have to resort to just filming the interior shots and doing the exterior shots at a later date. By trying to complete all the filming this weekend it enables us to spend a lot of time sorting out editing, soundtrack and title screens. We believe allowing ourselves to spend a lot of time on these three things will help improve our final opening sequence a great deal.