Diary Post 5: A day of filming

On Sunday (8th of February 2015) we went to Nonsuch Park to film the opening two minute scene of our film. We started to film around 11:30 am and finished around 3pm .We chose to film at Nonsuch purely because it was a lot easier to access and the area was a lot more familiar and better known to us. This is helpful because if we were needed to go back and film footage it will be easier to get there and back. 

We tried walking further into the woods for a while, until we found an area which was more abandoned and had dirt/muddy paths and lots of trees around with fallen leaves. This helped us set the scene but furthermore make our idea more realistic. Although the weather was sunny and bright, which we did not want, this enabled us to experiment with lighting, we used this to our advantage as if we were to actually film on a darker day it may have been view differently as it is now easier to out an effect on the footage and play around with the brightness and contrast. Whereas, if the raw footage was darker even if edited some areas might have come out highly contrasted restricting us in wanting to show and accentuate for example certain areas of the face. 

We spent the majority of the day in the woods, although we did set off our filming by shooting footage for the car scene of the two minute opening. In order to capture this effectively we filmed this on a quiet road which ensured us freedom of being able to shoot whatever we wanted but also from a variety of angles and as the road was not only quiet (helpful as it wasn't dangerous and we were not interrupted by other people or drivers) but wide with a few trees on each side (we were able to shoot from behind the trees). 

As Anna played the protagonist of our film, she were what we had planned during our research into costume designs. We had to ensure that through what she wore, we were able to appeal to the target audience and make it apparent that she was in fact a teenage girl. Anna wore a hoodie, with a white t-shirt underneath (which she had smeared mud on to), leggings and a pair of white converse (the attire of a stereotypical teenage girl). She did not only put mud on her clothes, she also put some on her face to help set the scenario and again remind the audience of what the lead character is and will be going through. Ellie and I, then filmed Anna running through the woods, we filmed the footage on our phones which have a HD feature, this helped as it made it appear a bit more professional and similarly helped because that way we both filmed more than enough footage with a variety of angles and ideas behind them. The variety of angles included some from behind trees, point of view shots, loose frames and including those which we practised in our preliminary tasks. Additionally, through carrying out the preliminary task I learnt that it is very important to get a lot of footage even when we think that we have the right amount as once we come to edit we will find that maybe some parts don't link as well as we were planning or aren't to the best standards or expectations. 

Overall, I believe that the hours we spent filming on Sunday were very successful and everything went well according to plan even when we had to compromise, as we managed to capture every shot including additional ones too . We can now go into the editing phase very well prepared. Although it wasn't as expected the weather did not hinder our filming progress or impacted the quality of any shots in any negative way. Throughout this post, I included behind the scene photographs to help envision everything that was explained above, perhaps in much more detail.