15th December 08 - Practice Filming Session.

For our practice filming task, we were asked to create a twelve shot clip showing a person reading a newspaper, including: an over the shoulder shot, an extreme close up and a P.O.V shot. After our camera tutorial, my group and I sat down and began to create our storyboard. We decided that Topaz and I would be the characters who are filmed, and Pebbles and Sevda were the people who would do the filming. However, we all had creative input as to what each other were doing. We decided to plan our storyboard before filming so that when it came time to film, we knew what we were doing and we didn't waste time.

Our filming was fun, and it came out very well. There were a few shaky shots that we had, but after being taught how to use Final Cut Pro, we were able to cut our shots, put them into the correct sequence, then edit them so that it looked more proffesional. My favourite shot we did was a high angled shot looking down on me. The way we edited it made it cut from a P.O.V shot to a shot as if I was being watched by a CCTV camera. It was fun playing around with Final Cut Pro and finding the Record Button and Timer on the screen to make it more like a CCTV camera.

The most difficult shot was the shot in which I was funning down Goswell Road. It was difficult, not only because it was physically demanding, but because we all soon realised that recording a moving object was difficult and we would have to retake the shot to get it perfect. As a group we found it hard to get the scene how we all imagined it. It was a challenging scene to do as it included panning. Pebbles had some trouble at keeping all of my body and in the frame, and at times had trouble following me with the camera! However, it was a learning experience for all of us, we began to get an idea as to which shots were more difficult than others, and the amount of times we would have to take every shot in order to get it done well.

When we were editing we realised that it would have been more effective to get the same shot from different angles, because when editing we were quite limited with what we could edit and how, but on the whole as a group I feel we did very well. Our short clip made sense and our continuity editing was done well. We tried to create suspense through the CCTV camera shot. Although we lucked into gettin the shot as Pebbles accidentally taped over another shot, it became possibly the most effective shot in our clip, and served to make our clip quite tense. Also tension is created in the scene were Topaz drops the newspaper onto the street. The camera follows her leaving the building and to outside where she drops the newspaper. To show her dropping the paper we used a panning shot. This tells the audience who may not neccessarily know about the task set that the newspaper has an important part to play in our clip. Also, the shot where I am running down Goswell Road creates alot of tension as this scene makes the audience wonder: Where I am running to? And; What I am running from?

If we had the chance to do this task again, I think we would have taken our same shots but done them from different angles so that we had more to edit and play around with. Also, when filming from behind a mirror, we needed to be more careful about seeing the reflection of the camera and the tripod in the mirror. However, I felt that on our first attempt as a group using cameras, we did very well. The feedback we got from our teacher was that our clip was very effective and our camera work was done very well. I am very excited to do the Thriller Opening.