Camera and Filming During the Preliminary Task

During the preliminary task I did a lot of the filming and camera work. While doing this I found that we ran into a couple of problems, especially due to setting.

We changed where we planned to film the dialogue scenes between Elli and Bethany three times, the first being in an English Room, the second in the English office and the third in a teacher’s office on the second floor of the school. The change of setting itself didn’t affect the overall product at all because all the clips that we used were from the same setting.

Another issue we ran into with setting was the size of the room we used. We found that it was far too cramped to be able to film in and sometimes the tripod wouldn’t fit. This meant we had to adapt from what we had originally planned to do in our storyboard – notably the planned mid-shot of Bethany hitting the wall which changed to a two shot of the two of them and then Elli approaching.

During filming we also added scenes which weren’t on the original storyboard as we thought it would add drama to the scene, for example the close up of the lock. We thought about adding this in because we thought it would emphasise how the victim was trapped. We also changed the third to final shot because we found that we could improve it by adding a dark shadow in which was cast over Bethany.

While we were filming we decided to do three takes of the same scene so we could choose which one we thought was the most effective. This also allowed us to experiment with different angles as well as decide upon what content of the filming was the most successful. The fact that we did each scene three times did mean that we were filming for much longer than expected but when it came to editing we found that this was a good idea as we didn’t lose any vital clips.

I found that the preliminary task was helpful because it allowed me to remember how to use the equipment again, since I hadn’t used it for a few years. This was good because we now think that we can use the equipment during the final product with ease as we know how to use the tripod and camera which will speed up the process.

During the time filming we often took reference from our storyboard in which we mainly adhered to. The storyboard we very helpful as it had all of the lines, camera shots and what we wanted to edit onto the scenes on it. It also helped us as we didn’t miss out any of the shots which we had planned – many of which were different shots and this allowed us to experiment with as many shots as we needed and decide which were the most effective. 

By Rebecca Gatfield