Shooting & Filming: On Location (Interior & Exterior)

On Wednesday 5th February we filmed for the best part of a whole morning, shooting on location in Alexandra Park, capturing all the footage we needed of exterior shots. The weather seemed to be in our favour, yet the coldness of the Wintery weather proved a bargain, adding to the cold and thrilling nature, mood and tone of the exterior shots.

We made sure that we had at least two or three takes on each shot, referring to my storyboards each time, so that we had more choice whilst editing in the post-production process. I would set-up the camera in position for each shot, sometimes discussing a particular shot angle for at least 5-10 minutes, then would be part of the action in front of the camera, Josh Emily and Chloe helping by simply pressing the "Record" button on and off.

I had questioned my position in front of the camera, as I felt that I would not have as much time behind the camera as I would have liked. However, as our lecturer sparked up hopes of A-Level Drama Students acting-out the scenes whilst we could execute our different tasks, we fell into the same unfortunate position as the rest of the groups in our lecture, where all hopes had been destroyed. Josh's friend Aidan had promised to step-in as "The Shadow", but a week before he opted out of acting, and I persuaded Josh to act as "The Shadow".

The following Wednesday 12th February, we filmed the remaining shots to do, the interior shots. We had previously speculated about the location of the interior shots, and came to the conclusion that we would have to film inside our College building. We decided to use the Media Studio rather than our classroom, as the sound would all go "in sync". On the whole everything went according to plan and our careful planning lead to a marathon run of capturing footage that morning. We had captured more interior footage than exterior footage, yet this didn't matter because overall we had more than we needed from both locations.

"Shadows Present" - Evaluation of Animatic

· We were given the task of producing an animatic, a movie file extracted from storyboard artwork, that would plan-out how our project would look on-screen. It was only supposed to be a plan, and from this we could draw conclusions on which shots we thought were the best, to be used for real. It was really the editor’s job to produce it, but I agreed with her that I would help since I drew the storyboards and I knew in which order the shots would appear on-screen.

· At around the same time we were asked to produce a PowerPoint presentation to show to the other groups in our lecture. It was a way of getting their feedback, and using this to further improve our project, since our target audience is students of the same age, between 15 and 24. I managed to produce an animatic at home without sound for the presentation. Chloe, our editor, decided that it was better for me to finish the animatic at home, so the next time we met as a group in the next lecture, we chose music and sound effects and I added these to the already completed animatic and finished the job by fading each shot into the next and fading sound in and out. When selecting music and sound effects as a group, I hope we have chosen these for the finished piece (for real) so that this is one less decision we have to worry about when editing the final piece.

· From producing an animatic I have learnt more about our editing software and am now even more confident than I was when I edited the Exchange project with the help from Josh and Marc, though I was pretty damn confident then!

· I have seen an animatic produced by another College, yet I didn’t realise how difficult it was to produce an animatic compared with producing and editing a piece with real people and moving images.

· The finished animatic seemed better than the version I had produced without sound. With titles included, the sound and storyboard artwork all came together to make a new story. Watching the animatic, I feel that I am the viewer of a completely different film. It gives the perspective of a cartoon-artist compared with the view of a director of a film with real people. Maybe like a Toy Story artist’s impression of a sequence and then the actual sequence directed by Steven Spielberg.

· From the animatic shown to our class (the version without sound), the feedback received was a bit negative. Various opinions were that we were trying to cram-in too much into a short 2-3 minute opening sequence. As if we were making a whole film not just the opening sequence. This feedback was very useful because we can now film our opening sequence, remembering not to add too much.

· The only thing I didn't like about the animatic was the editing of the sound. I used a gunshot sound effect which repeated itself every ten seconds or so, and although I only wanted one gunshot I couldn’t make the sound clip this short and was forced to have 2 gunshots instead. This has however added more emphasis to the end of the opening sequence, but I shall try not to repeat the same mistake in the final piece.

· The other thing I didn’t like was the fading-out of one piece of music then the fading-in of the next piece of music. On the finished piece the fading seems too rushed and what I actually wanted was for there to be a short silence before the next piece of music faded-in.

· I have compared my animatic with the one created by other groups and the one created by the other College, yet my opinion hasn’t changed - that ours seems a little bit faster-paced with loads of shots and fast-paced music. Though it does depend upon the desired pace of the film and the music that is used to emphasise this pace.

· If I had the chance to do this again (which I probably will in my spare time), I would edit the sound a little more carefully and try not to add too many shots into the animatic. I have to say, even though I have never produced an animatic before I have taken myself by storm. I didn’t think I could produce such a good piece (in my opinion) in such little time available. And it has taught me a lot about how to plan out the shots and how to look at them and decide “is that good or not”. Like reading an essay back to yourself to make sure it makes sense, but instead watching the whole way through and making decisions on shot size, framing, shot types and so on…..

"Shadows Present" - Coursework Project Animatic

Creating an animatic is a very useful piece of pre-production work as it gives us an insight into what our final film opening will look like when all our chosen shots are put together. From creating an animatic we have learnt what our film will look like alongside sound, and with the help from Chloe (our editor), we have had the chance to consider the length of each shot and the order in which they appear.

After I had completed the storyboards, we cut each frame apart and arranged it together to form a look-a-like of our final piece, but in storyboard drawings. We then applied 2 of our music choices to add extra atmosphere and make the animatic seem more realistic and like the final piece.

The music choices were from our final list of 4, but because we haven't made a final decision yet we decided to incorporate 2 of our choices here to see which one is best suited. The first piece is by Jan Hammer ("Clues") and is slow and more noir style, whereas the second piece by A R Rahman ("Mausam and Escape") is more for a running pace but has an Indian style.

As you can see our animatic runs over 3 minutes, but in the real film the shots will be shorter and the action in each scene will be quicker than it's shown here. Also we decided after creating the animatic that the personnel titles will appear at the beginning of the film and we would have no music, or very quiet background music on the final scene where the 2 people exchange their dialogue and get into a fight. This is because we want the dialogue to be heard clearly and the gunshot to shock the audience with a loud effect.

At the end of our animatic we have also added the 2 gunshot sounds we wish to use. We found the gunshots on a sound-effects CD in the Suffolk College library, and they have proved very useful as we wouldn't be able to create a gunshot sound ourselves (for obvious reasons!).

(With sound) (Also on YouTube - www.youtube.com/chriskenworthy)