Updates!

I have no creative streak in me right now to come up with a decent, quirky post title so this will do...

I thought I'd do a little update on the current circumstances with our opening sequence. So, quite a few things have changed.

First off, our actress Vickie who was going to play the 'young woman' is now unable to shoot any days with us. Which as you can imagine left me and Farhath in a bit of a jam as we had no back up...(learning from mistakes...) but thankfully, Farhath being the top banana she is and also having the advantage of Drama in her repertoire filled in the gap. 

Also dates for filming have moved and we've had to reschedule the argument scene and all the interior shots to next week, cutting it quite fine as our deadline for filming is Tuesday 5th. But hopefully we'll get it all done and dusted. 

We;ve also had to change location for Charles's house. We were all unable to get our own homes available to film in due to many reasons so we switched it up a bit in a way so we can use the college. We decided to go with Charles at work on one of the Macs and the young woman enters his work place and confronts him. We think it will work and flow well with the rest of the story and hopefully we can show this through editing.

It's been a very stressful but exciting and equally fun week. Having to re do shoots was a pain but it needed to be done. 
Me and Farhath also decided to take a couple days break and to spend the time de-stressing as well as planning a solid schedule for Monday and Tuesday. I think the break in between will be super helpful as things we're getting a bit much while filming and we wasn't taking time to concentrate on the little things. 


I'll be posting some screen shots from our second shoot soon as well as our behind the scenes footage. 

Day 3: REDO REDO REDO

Day 3 of filming was the 28th February. Today we had to go out a re-shoot the same scenes from day 1 as the footage captured was way to dark to use. We left college at 2:45pm and headed straight out to the beach to re shoot and we got some much better, clearer shots. Filming was less frustrating in a sense as we knew what we wanted and was looking for. Although, we are still in need of filming some extra clips of Charles driving away and reaction shots.

The days seem to be passing so fast and it's as if we never have enough time. while filming time flies by and we soon have to stop. Something I've noticed when we're filming is how time consuming it is and that we're (especially me) quite the perfectionists. Our next shoot to (hopefully) finish filming will be Thursday 7th and Friday 8th. On these days we'll be filming the start of the opening sequence, the young womans death and reaction shots.

Below are some screenshots from day 3 of filming:

Exterior of Charles leaving work and entering the car. 

Some interior shots on Charles driving.

The shot above we was thinking of using as the background for the title sequence also Farhath introducing a little vlog.

 Charles arriving at the beach.

A nice interior shot on Charles leaving his car, we used this to give the impression of someone watching him.

Some long, wide and tracking shots.

These last few screen shots are my favourite. I love the positioning of Charles and how scenic it all is. I feel these medium, long and close up shots of him off the one side more than the other make it look more professional.

Overall it was a good day and we got better quality filming done!

Day 2: HECTIC!

Day 2 of filming.

Today could not of been more annoying, frustrating and just plain hectic.
I didn't have college till 1:15pm today so I had no chance of seeing Farhath as she's busy all day and I had Maths to revise for, so it was all a bit foggy about when and where we'll be filming today. After a few texts we soon came to terms with the difficulty of rounding everyone up for todays shoot and also our camera is missing?! So I'm hoping that our footage from last night isn't erased...Won't be happy! 

So we've planned to reschedule our filming to tomorrow, Thursday 28th. Tomorrow will be the argument scenes and if we can squeeze in, some more outside shots.

Although this post is short and uneventful it's more lesson learning with time and fitting things in. Hopefully tomorrow goes according to plan and we can make up for lost time!

Reasons for re-shooting on Day 1...

We filmed quite late today and we spent most of our time filming Charles's driving scenes so getting the more important parts such as tracking shots and reaction shots were left a little late meaning the darkness sort of 'devoured' our visual window. 
Here are some shots to show you what exactly I mean:

The lighting is very bad at this point and the quality decreasing a large quantity. At one point the camera even started to unfocus which was very distressing (You can see this in the last image).
The only option was to reshoot, even after playing around on Final Cut Pro we couldn't do much to change the brightness or colour tone to make it looks any better. It gave it that over the top editing feel that no one likes.

Some snaps from Day 1!

Below are some screenshot images I took from Final Cut Pro while I was looking over our footage we shot on Tuesday 26th Feb. Fortunately the first few shots of Charles (Sam) driving along the street were perfect and we didn't need to re shoot these. But for some of the others it was a bit disappointing to find little things cropping up into shot that ruin the mis-en-scene resulting in us having to re shoot on another day. The shots below are quite varied with some long shots and wide shots of the car passing by.

Here are some shots from the interior of the car of Charles driving to the final destination. But as you can see the mis-en-scene is broken as Papa Smurf has decided to get some screen time...We can't exactly have a horror/thriller movie of a man who's murdered someone accompanied by Smurfs in his getaway vehicle now, can we?

The over the shoulder shot above is one of my favourites  I have a thing for 'artist' angles and close ups but once again the illusion has vanished due to our blue friend hanging from the car mirror...

The two frames above I think are still able to be of use as nothing is out of place and the angles look neat and tidy.

As for the next two shots above it's hard to say whether this footage can be used as we had to shoot on two different days one being foggy and moody and the other quite pleasant and sunny...we'll have to see if we can alter the lighting as I really light the camera shot of Charles inside his car.

And finally is a little screen grab of our footage on Final Cut and us doing a quick Vlog. 

Day 1: Getting the hang of things

Day 1 of filming.

Well, it is safe to say it was very cold! Today was the day we would film Sam (Charles) driving along on his way to the beach to clear his head and also where he sights the ghost. 

Working with Sam was great! He was very cooperative and patient while me and Farhath would faff about setting the camera up onto the tripod. We got some great shots of him driving up and down and around roads and also some interior shots of him while driving (very tricky).

The shots used were a wide range of angles such as wide shots, long shits, medium close ups, close ups..it goes on. While filming out in the cold we soon got very numb hands and decided to venture into the car for his anxious expressions to be filmed, this came out to be a lot more difficult than expected...

Sam owns a small red car so fitting a camera with a tripod in this car wasn't that bad...but trying to film while holding onto the camera, mic and tripod proved to be more of a challenged and we almost risked our lives trying to capture his acting!

During the end of the shoot we was at Birnbeck Pier trying to shoot some more of Sam before seeing the ghosts but the day was fading rapidly and we could only get a few. We'll need to look over these shots as I think they might be a tad too dark to use.

Over all it was a great day and experience wise we learned a lot!

Re-location, re-location, re-location

Yep, we re-located! We decided that the room we previously wanted to film in would be too much of a hassle; so we went on the hunt once again to find a new room to shoot the crucial scenes. We found one thankfully, looking how we wanted it to. We also had great adventures filming in the boy's loos....(we couldn't find another sink...) here's some pictures of the new location, apologies for the quality at the time it's all we could get our hands on!