G321 - Filming My Preliminary Task

When filming my piece, I found it was difficult to film the arc shot as I didn't have access to a Dolly and therefore first attempted to do this shot by hand which I found too shaky. I then decided to be as resourceful as possible and so placed the tripod on a desk chair and wheeled it however this prevented me from being able to arc as quickly as I would have liked as this would have caused the camera to fall off the chair and break.

I also found it difficult to film Kieren skidding the bike as the tripod was unable to go low enough for the shot and so I had to balance the camera on the floor. This meant it was quite unstable and as a result of this Kieren had to be careful when skidding the bike so as not to break the camera. To resolve this, he did not stop the bike completely and after the skid, cycled out of the frame. This will allow me to edit the clip so as to make it appear that Kieren did stop the bike.

When filming the shot in which Kieren speaks, I realised after filming that Kieren had been looking in the wrong place when speaking. This caused me to have to film this section again so as to comply with the 180 degree rule.

The main issue I had with filming my preliminary task was that my actors were unreliable and therefore filming dates kept having to be moved. This impacted on the filming as it meant having to spend less time filming than I would have liked so as to be able to film everything I wanted. However, when I started to near the deadline for the task I started dictating when I would be filming rather than asking and this made a big difference to whether my actors were in the right place at the right time and in the correct costume.

I made the decision to work individually as I feel I am able to work better this way and remain more focused on the task in hand without being distracted by people around me. I feel like I made the right decision in doing this as I was able to achieve all that I set out to within the given time and I was happy with my final film.

My favourite aspect of filming was when I was filming shots 13 and 14 because we had a lot of time to play around with these aspects whilst waiting for other actors to turn up. This resulted in many outtakes, some of which caused by my actor purposefully doing things completely wrong. This made the filming process more fun and light-hearted when it was starting to get very stressful and beginning to frustrate me. This proved that good working relationships between everyone involved can result in an enjoyable process as well as a successful outcome.