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.