Filming Journal

1/10/12: Day one.

On our production day we planned our piece. We made a list of all of the things that we needed to plan in order to make our filming more effective and easy to film.These included:

• Location
• Set
• Characters
• Shot list

Location: 
On our script, it states that the scene is set interior, so we knew that we needed to film indoors, or at least make it look like it is indoors.

Set:
We decided to use one of the empty offices at our school, as it looks very similar to an ordinary office, and with a bit of readjustment of the furniture, would also be a very easy and convenient place to film, as it is in an area of the school that is not that busy, so we would not get disrupted whilst filming.

Characters:
In the script there are three listed characters:

• BAZ- the main character
• ANNA,-the receptionist at Simon and Garfunkel's, the law firm that BAZ has gone to.
• MR RIPLEY - an unseen character, whom you only hear the voice of.

Shot List:

• Our shot list consisted of all of the shots that we needed to film in their chronological order that they will be shown in the final cut, but due to continuity, we will not film them in this order.
• Our original idea was for the first shot to be a point of view shot of my character (BAZ) walking up the stairs. We filmed this using a handheld camera, held at eye-level, and we decided against using a Steadicam  as we believed that the more raggedy look added to the effect we were trying to create for our psychological thriller.

Problems that occurred whilst Filming:

Whilst filming, as it was our first attempt and experience of filming, there were a few issues that we had to overcome. Some of these included:

• Reflections: As one of the shots we used was a close up of a hand opening a door, in our first recording, we noticed that we could see the reflection of the camera in the glass, so had to overcome this by slightly moving the camera so that it was lined up with the wooden frame, and consequently out of shot.
• Continuity: As we had to film over  a number of days, we had to ensure that all of our factors included in the frame were identical to how we had it before. these included costume; hair and make-up; positioning of subjects; positioning of camera etc.

Day two (9/10/12).

We decided that the original opening shot that we filmed was possibly not the best choice. The original was a point of view shot from BAZ's perspective. We, as a group decided to re-shoot the scenes we had filmed previously, as we wanted to be able to introduce the charcter to the audience before introducing the point of view shots; however we wanted to maintain the initial enigma surrounding the character that the point of view shot created. We did this by using close-ups of different parts of the characters body; for example, in the shot where she is walking up the stairs, we used a tracking shot to follow her, whilst using a close up to show just her feet from behind. This way it is still clear to the audience that the character is walking up the stairs, but is also a lot clearer in the shot point, as it is a smoother shot, due to the Steadicam  and there is still an air of enigma, as you have not yet been properly introduced to the character, as the audience has not yet seen her face. We then went on to film the scene in the corridor, which we had originally planned to start with a close up of BAZ's hand (empty in present-day, or holding the parcel in the flashback) to emphasise the difference, and then zoom out to a whole body shot whilst also moving back in a tracking shot. Unfortunately the corridor in which we were filming was too short for us to be able to do the whole of our shot. We overcame this problem by deciding that instead of zooming out we would stay focused on the hand, to draw the audience's attention to it even more than we had originally planned, and instead follow the hand thorough the corridor. We did this by using a combination of the camera on a  Steadicam-cam, and the cameraman sitting on a wheelie-chair, being dragged by another member of the group, to enable that it was a very smooth shot.

Problems that occurred whilst filming:

• Sounds of footsteps: It was fine for there to be one set of footsteps in the scene, as this would be part of the diagetic sound elements, as the shot was a close up of the feet of someone walking up steps. However, we realised when we were watching the playback, that we could also hear the footsteps of the cameraman.To overcome this problem we decided that the person operating the camera should take off her shoes, so that her footsteps were not as heavy, and not as audible.