Production Day-What I learnt.

On Monday, we had a Production day, where we were taken off time-table, and spent the whole day working on our media, and started developing our ideas for our short-film, and eventually started to film some of our shots. In the morning of the day, we had a "mini-workshop" with one of the teachers at our school, as he has over 25 years experience in the film-making industry, where he worked as an assistant director of a number of different films. He taught and explained to us a few key techniques that we could use to help us to improve our shorts, as well as helping us to understand what working in the film industry is actually like. some of the things that we learnt about were:

• Continuity
• Focus
• What a "set-up" is
• How you can use zooming in and out, combined with moving the camera backwards and forwards on a track to make an effect.

Continuity: In order to make a film believable for the audience, everything in the frame, or the "Mise en scene" must be correct, otherwise the audience will notice these slip ups and so will pick faults with, and believe the film less. By making sure that everything in the scene is consistent, and, if the shots change, everything in shot is exactly the same in all of the takes, so that, for example, if a woman has her hair down in one shot, and then in a different shot, her hair is tied back, without the time for her to tie it up, the continuity would be awful, and so the movie would not be believable.



Focus: We learnt two different types of focus: Sharp and Soft focus. The differences in focus are used to draw attention to and from certain subjects in the shot, as to portray different meanings.



Soft Focus



Sharp Focus (the leaves)

What a Set-up is: All of how you arrange/position the subjects in the frame, the lighting, the camera angles, the zoom etc. is the set-up. Everything in the set-up is done for a reason, and has a meaning or purpose for doing so. If even the smallest detail is changed/ altered, even in the slightest, can make a huge difference to how the frame is interpreted.

How a use of a combination of techniques can create effects:

You can use zooming in and out, combined with moving the camera backwards and forwards on a track to make an effect. For example, In the Alfred Hitchcock movie Vertigo, in order to overcome the problem of being able to portray to the audience the sensation of vertigo. As the film was made in the 50's, Hitchcock did not have all the fancy technology that we have nowadays, and so had to figure out a way to overcome this glitch. He did this by moving the camera back and forth along tracks and zooming in and out at the same time. The effect he created has since been used in a number of different films. The effect can be seen in this short clip below:

Overall the day was a lot of fun,but at the same time i also learnt a lot. Thanks to Gerard Wall who helped us all alot.