48 Hour Filming Day 1 & 2: Beaches, Borrowed Housemates & Broughty Ferry

SO! We've spent the last 48 hours filming our scenes for our - currently untitled - group film project.

DAY 1:
Lots of fun on the camera's shooting in the Tower Building to capture our detectives 'office' scenes. This included filming our beginning and end scenes so we could capture all the footage we needed for this setting in one go with out having to worry about the scene changing /appearing inconsistent or losing Kaitlin's borrowed house-mates.

We decided to use 2 camera's so we could capture all our scenes from 2 angles as we'd have up to 3 people in 1 shot at any time, and this would hopefully give us various shots and perspectives to cut together when we edit.

A couple of the shots needed to be in 1st perspective so we had one camera mounted on the tripod and the other which I handheld (steady hands!).

We then filmed a couple of the shots of the detective (Kaitlin) trailing the key suspect of the missing hat (Wendy) at Finchers flat. We captured shots of Wendy performing various house tasks as well as a few slightly trickier shots including both characters sneaking up a flight of stairs which I captured with use of a tripods

Again we wanted to get these at different angles for us to edit together so we could focus on various things at the right time especially facial expressions - this is particularly important as our film will be a silent movie.

Checking out our awesome footage

DAY 2:
We used today to capture the remaining scenes needed for the middle part of our story. We shot a variety of scenes, but one issue that definitely became apparent was our lack of a storyboard, which meant that there was a bit of guess work when it came to what scenes we'd be shooting (we had more of a general idea).

Filming in da beach at Broughty Ferry

This is DEFINITELY something i'll make sure to do for future projects are it would have definitely saved us a bit more time, and will make the editing process a whole lot easier as it would just be a matter of stitching the relevant scenes together. We'll now face the long task of having to decide what order we'll want to put the scenes in.

But despite that i'm definitely feeling a lot more confident using the camcorders and really feel like i've started to discover the art of capturing the right angles and trying to make the most out of a scene.

I've also learnt that Broughty Ferry makes the best icecream.

Week 2: 48 Hours, Hats & Heroics

This week we've been given a 48 hour film project. In groups we need to produce a film in 48 hours in any genre and style. The only requirement is the use of 1 prop and quote given to us by Phil.

The brief for our 48 hour film project

Our helpful assistants (camcorders)

I'm in a group with Annita, Wendy, Fincher and Kaitlin and our prop is a hat and our quote is "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so". We've spent most of this afternoon trying to decide on our genre and story, and although it took a while we eventually decided on a Film Noir, Detective type comedy that we want to edit into a Charlie Chaplin-esque style with the black and white and sped up scenes. The storyline will revolve around the detective tracking down the 'missing hat'.




I have NO idea (currently) about camera's, but Wendy and Fincher have previous experience with making short films and we're using a Canon Legria HFR56 and Sony HDR-SR5E.

I've been having a play around with how to use them and setting them up on the tripods (nearly knocked out by one) and already feeling a lot more confident about using them! I'm really liking the lightness and image produced by the Canon. It seems to have a bit more colour than the Sony, although it's probably only a little less clear.

We're going to start shooting our scenes tomorrow, focusing on the detective's 'office' (Thank you Tower Building room G3) and Kaitlin's roped in a couple of her house-mates to play the male roles that we'll need (a secretary and a client). On Wednesday we'll be going to Broughty Ferry to film the rest of our shots on the beach and around the town.