Practise Filming

Here is the murder sequence that I filmed with a differnt group. this involved filming a sequence from a film that lead up to a murder we had planned in a different piece of work. This was good practice for the coursework because although it happens in the middle of the film and not the beginning, it is a similar task - you have to set the scene and make sure the shots can be edited together.

Planning and Storyboarding

We thought out the storyboard quite efficiently in the initial stages, although as we got into the later stages of completing we didn’t take into account the time it would take to film each individual shot. So in the end we didn’t have every shot we wrote on our storyboard. This meant that that it was not as elaborate as we would have hoped and was at first quite hard to make sense of. Even though it made it harder to edit because we had not completed every shot necessary, it was still quite easy to film each shot because of our well planned storyboard. This is one of the easiest parts of the task because our group worked well together; this meant communicating our group’s ideas onto the paper was straightforward. To improve on this next time we could perhaps use different methods of planning ( such as a mind map)from this project we have learnt  that they take time and if you plan better it will really help when it comes to the next stage of filming.

Camera angles

We found that because of the way our story went we only needed one person from our group to act. This was to our advantage because it meant that the remaining three of us could concentrate more on things like camera angles. As this was the case we were able to get some quite professional camera angles with all of our ideas put together. I found that when it came to editing we had not taken into account background noise (i.e. planes) this affected our piece because it ruined the atmosphere slightly in certain scene. I think that we could have had more variety of camera angles because even though the ones we got were quite good the variety would have made it look more professional as an overall piece rather than individual shots. On the whole I think that our camera angles were ok but there was definitely be room for improvement. Mainly adding other camera angles relevant to the type of piece we are trying to show.

Working in groups

I was very happy with the group I was in as we each had individual strengths that we were able to offer to make the work better. We had good cooperation and had many different ideas. We were very good at using each of our ideas that were the best and merging them together to make it better. Any ideas that were perhaps not the best for the scene we were doing us we could say so. This meant that it was easier to get the best work we could. One thing that we found was how quickly we made some of the decisions. We took too long making some decisions for things like whether the acting was real and believable enough. This meant we had less time to complete each shot and ended up not finishing all of them. From doing this I have learnt that the key to working well in a group is to have cooperation. Letting everyone be involved in decision making and making the decisions quickly rather than debating to long. When doing the real thing I will keep these things in mind.

Acting

The quality of acting amongst our group was reasonable. Considering that the main actor had had no previous acting experience it was hard to make the acting realistic. This was probably the most time consuming part of what we did. This took long because most of our shots had to be repeated multiple times. I played a small part in this piece which didn’t require too much acting skills, so it was shot in one. One thing that was successful was the level of cooperation as we quickly agreed on who would play who. Also even though the main actor had no experience he was happy to take on the role. This helped us tremendously because it meant we could get straight into the filming. Next time I will definitely consider acting more myself as I have had previous experience, and I know that it takes longer to put together when the acting is not as strong.