On Friday, we filmed our preliminary task. We worked in a group of five (Simon, Georgia, Alice, Leila and I). And had to film the following sequence:
After bouncing around a few different ideas, we decided to make it a mysterious sequence with two girls (played by Georgia and Leila) with a gun. The audience did not know what the gun was for, but would probably infer that Leila needed Georgia to kill someone, the gun symbolizing violence and murder. We borrowed the gun from the theatre department. It was not that realistic, but the man who lent it to us said that taking it out into public is illegal.
Of course, we began by bubbling and white-balancing the camera. This took a relatively short amount of time. We used a blank piece of paper for the white balance and then created our name tag for the task on it. After filming our name tag for a couple of seconds, we moved on to the actual task.
We divided the roles for filming. Simon was the cameraman, Alice worked as the continuity, Georgia acted as "B", Leila acted as "A" and I was the director. Matt was helping us through the task. We worked in the editing suite. This meant that our space was more limited, the gun being the only prop of interest.
We began by filming the entire sequence in wide shot, the idea being that we will be editing it later and so we can pick out the takes that we wanted. We adhered to the 180 rule at all times! Following the storyboard, we shot the over the shoulder shots for both Georgia and Leila. We finished up with the close-ups and were then free to do any experimental/interest shots. We didn't have much time because we had taken a lot of re-takes. This was mainly due to the fact that the actors kept missing their marks, and because Simon (in our group) kept making us laugh when he said "rolling". This wasted a lot of time, but luckily we were able to power through.
The additional angles that we shot were the gun being slammed into Georgia's chest, which turned out to look quite interesting, a close-up of the gun in Leila's hand, an extreme close-up of Leila's face, and Georgia's hair flipping as she turned around. We wanted to do some shots of their feet, but ran out of time.
I really enjoyed being the director because I felt that my opinions were being taken seriously. I liked being in charge and deciding what to do next. I learnt that it was important to divide up the roles. It was helpful to have a specific task to focus on, so everything was done well and not pieced together.
My least favourite thing about filming was the stress of getting in done all in time. I didn't mind the repetition of the filming, though many of my group members were getting exasperated.
I learnt that patience AND ability to work under time-pressure are extremely important when making a film. They may seem like two contradictory ideas, but having the patience to repeat something until it is right and being able to do so in good time are very useful skills to have when making a film.
Next time, we should spend less time on our idea, but more time on developing it and filming. All in all, I really enjoyed filming the sequence.
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