film
For the last two weeks we have been producing our first 20 second film using a video camera and premier pro 6 software to edit. This has been the first collaborative assignment we have been involved in on the course, and I have really enjoyed the experience. I enjoyed having to think on your feet, be creative and improvize as you go along with ideas flowing from a everyone.
Initially we looked at a few small clips from films for ideas, and this was a great help in formulating the storyboard later on.
We began by thinking of ideas for the theme of ‘ someone goes through a door’ – this was done by using problem solving techniques such as brain storming to generate lots of diverse ideas. We then moved onto storyboarding a few 20 second films in small frames almost. I really enjoyed drawing the ideas out into paper and thinking about different shots.
We had to include at least 3 shots… a close up, mid shot and long shot within the time frame.
Once we had decided on which film to work on, we then got down to staging the set in an area of the building to shoot the film.
It took me a bit of time to get to grips with the video camera having not used one before, the most difficult things I found to do were to change the lever from video record to playback I found this really fiddly, and to zoom in and out without staggering the film, so that it was a fluid movement took a bit of practice too.
We all collaborated on the choice of shot and did several with more than one shot which we decided could be edited later depending on which worked best. We even made some materials to use in the film such as a keyhole shape to make it look like an eye was peering through the keyhole. This worked really well. Another area which worked well was creating a blur on the film, we managed to work this out by taking the camera off automatic focus and putting it on manual focus so that we could control the blur to make it look like the protagonist was shortsighted which was intergal to the story line.
We also had to improvise quite a bit to achieve the look we wanted. One difficult long shot was based on getting a good view of a sign before the door shut. This was quite tricky to film before the sign dissapeared behind the door. We had a few trial goes which didn’t work that well before we had to rope in Liz to physically hold back the door at the bottom (out of shot) and then let it go once we had got the shot!
Next week we will be editing the film to fit it into its 20 second timeslot. Watch this space!!
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