Construction Post 3: Week 3 Production

During this week we began editing our studio shots. As we were yet to film our male narrative (due to it being a location based shoot), we decided to create an outline of where all of our studio shots would go in our sequence. In order to do this we had to make decisions regarding how our two separate narratives would flow together. For example, we decided to largely stick to studio based shots during large moments of dialogue as it gave us the opportunity to include our lip synced shots.This meant that the male narrative mainly fell upon moments of instrumentals as words were not significant in this sequence. Building upon advice from our teachers which was to try to bring the two narratives together more, we also wanted to include moments where the two narratives appeared to link. For example, during shooting I thought it would be effective if I pushed the camera away from my face and into a pan so that we could sync this to the pan of Andy that I shot on location.

The pan

We then synced Andy's shot to another shot of me so that it gave the illusion of a 180 degree spin. I think that this effectively linked the two narratives as well as helping to create a variation of shot types. This also allowed us to experiment with different shot transitions as we used dissolves and fades to try and make these shots flow.

During the weekend we had our on location shoot to film the male narrative. Originally, we had only planned to film on the Saturday of this weekend, however, our actor was unreliable and arrived to the shoot several hours late. This meant that we were forced to return to Shoreditch on the following day to finish off the rest of our shots. This was obviously frustrating, however, it taught me the importance of scheduling and sourcing reliable actors. Despite this set back, this weekend proved to be a very efficient one as we were able to address all of the issues raised in our test shoot. We were also able to experiment with the new shots that we had created. For example, I knew that we needed more angles of Andy running in order to make our video more interesting visually. A problem that we encountered was feeling restricted to creating static shots of Andy running due to us only having a tripod. In order to overcome this i came up with a method in which the tripod was put down to its lowest point and then placed under the arm of whoever was recording. This meant that we had the freedom to move with the camera and follow Andy as he ran. Originally I had attempted to film these shots whilst running with the camera, however, I felt that my hand was too shaky so passed this on to Matt who completed this with a steadier hand. However, some of the shots within our video still appear very shaky. I would have preferred to have a smoother camera movement, although I do think that the shaking creates energy and reflects the paranoid nature that the character finds themself in.

An example of a shaky shot

Overall, this week was a very efficient one as we built a good foundation for us to continue building upon in the following weeks.