18/12/09

In this lesson we started to edit our footage. After importing our footage to Final Cut Pro Sara explained to us how important it is to set a scratch disc in order to keep our footage and progress safe. The program we were using was Final Cut Pro, at first this was extremely daunting and looked difficult but after being explained a few basics it became easier and easier with more practice. I found I picked up techniques and shortcuts quite well, such as pressing apple+i on the keyboard and apple+o to select the part of the clip you need. I began by doing a rough cut of my film putting the clips in the correct order very roughly, choosing clips out of each shot to create a storyline similar to the storyboard, this was fairly easy but it was obvious there was a lot of work to do as there was ‘cut’, ‘action’ or ‘rolling on’ being shouted prematurely over the top of useful footage. By looking at the overall footage we had captured everything we aimed to in terms of sticking to the storyboard, but seemed we had slipped slightly from the brief in terms of showing a gothic side of Bath. The shots of Bath we did get I believe are good but I would try to get more if we did this again. I think we did quite a good job but may have got carried away with excitement of making a film and using equipment rather than keeping the brief fresh in our minds.

11/12/09

Evaluation so far
I think the work we have done as a group so far is quite good. I think if I did this again I would make sure especially that we got more footage in each location as I feel we got too much of what we didn’t need to focus on. I enjoyed being an actor in the film although I would like to get involved with using equipment more. I think the organisation was very good with communication between contacts regular and effective. I am looking forward to editing the film now and getting a final product

4/12/09

Today was the first lesson we would be filming the majority of our film. We collected the equipment we needed and headed off to our locations with the permission slips we needed. We had originally chosen to film in a spooky dark track near Jayke’s Grandfather’s house but this wasn’t possible as we couldn’t get an exact address to get permission, to solve this problem we found a spotted a location by the Weir in Bath and we had a man named Chris from suited and Booted with us who said as long as we didn’t disturb the public it would be ok to film there. As it was fairly quiet we decided to fill in some gaps than would be missing on the storyboard such as parts linking scenes to other scenes. We tried out a couple of spooky techniques such as filming the same shot twice with actors missing in one so that once edited it showed an actor disappearing into thin air. The filming in this location I feel was the most successful and achieved some really good effects which, after editing, would add to the eerie atmosphere of our film. Chris was very helpful and even willing to get involved in our film I found his help encourages us to look at things differently and try out different techniques.
The next location we were filming at was Widcombe Cemetery. Around halfway there we discovered problems with the equipment being quite heavy and awkward to carry, we passed a small church called St. Micheal's church with a graveyard and discussed the option of changing our location. After enquiring within the church to get permission and informing the tutor of our change of plans we commenced filming there. This filming went very well we did a few takes to ensure we had enough to work with. At one point a problem was that some kids were kicking a football around and getting it in shot. To avoid this we were going to mover the tripod with the camera but they went away.
To get to our next location we had to get a taxi as it was quite far away, we did more filming here than what was expected and included a lot of the storyboard in this part of the day. I was in a few of the shots and as it was the opening shot it was fairly important. We tried different camera angles and various compositions of the shot, we also thought about make-up as I had to look dead. I think this went quite well and we got some really effective shots relevant to our theme and storyline. While I was not in shot I took charge of directing as by this time our director had left the course. I made sure the shots were kept relevant to the storyboard and I also wanted to watch and learn what was going on with the camera.