Preliminary task - Filming

21^st January 2011

In this two hour lesson we started to film our rom-com sequence, we firstly looked around for locations spots that matched our storyboard designs, we found various outdoor locations as well as hallways and classrooms. We then needed a male and a female to play the two main characters, Rachel Aylott and Jake Whitehouse were happy to help perform our script. Once we had sorted this out we began filming we thought that it would be easier to go through the story board chronologically however Rachel needed to be somewhere else soon so we filmed her scenes first. Daisy and Tom set up the tri-pod and I talked though the lines, timing, facial expression and general body language with both Rachel and Jake, after the camera was set up in a high angle two shot we went though a couple of takes and test runs to make the scene perfect. After this we then finished the last scene Rachel was in with ease as it was within the same room and with short exchanges of dialogue. However I believe this scene could be improved through certain aspects, one being the dialogue as the characters constantly say “I’m sorry” I find that it becomes rather repetitive. The second aspect we could have improved on was the placing and Jakes blocking, towards the end of the scene Jake clutches his head and turns away from the camera, this wasn’t planned and makes the scene look slightly armature. We then finished of the rest of our filming with ease. We used the rest of our time trying to upload our video onto the computer ready for the next lesson that concentrates on editing.

Preliminary Task – storyboarding

17^th of January 2011

Today our group started discussing ideas for our sequence, as a group we had many ideas on what we could do, we firstly discussed what genre we wanted to concentrate on. We decide to go for a rom-com instead of just romance or a thriller so we could add elements of humour in and we could look at new and interesting themes before we started on the 2 minute 'Thriller task'. Another idea our group came up with was for our male character to be a hero trying to save his love from danger i.e. being held hostage. Eventually we ended up with the idea of a couple’s relationship difficulties and the constant struggle for the male character to get his girlfriend back however is unsuccessful. Once we agreed on our idea we started to storyboard the main events within our sequence as well as scripting it, as there were only three members of our group in for this lesson we found ourselves working on different tasks for example two of us working on the storyboard, one drawing and one giving ideas out and the other writing the script. The advantage of this is we got things completed quicker although the disadvantage to this is that it became hard for the script writer to create dialogue without knowing where characters were going to be placed. Although there were miner problems to some of our working style as a three we worked well, kept to task and completed everything so it would be ready for filming in the next lesson.
 

Introduction to course and camera safety.

10th of January 2011

Today we were introduced to the preliminary task, we were given instructions on camera safety for example learning about the certain buttons on the camera and also the specific ways to open a camera stand and connect the camera upon it. The first task we were faced with were the groups, who we would be grouped with and how many people would be in a group. As a class we decided that four to five people in a group would be the best due to the amount of people in the class, I think that this is a good amount of people as it allowed our group to have a fair amount of ideas, but there weren’t to many that we couldn’t delegate jobs when we started filming. Once we decide this I was put into a group of four consisting of myself, Daisy, Tom and Ellie. In our groups we then started planning our short sequence involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with which she/he then exchanges dialogue.