Filming production

 The last week and half of our class time have been spent filming our pre-planned shots that we completed a few weeks ago. Normally, this process would be simple: Go in, film, and leave. However, things proved to be rather challenging not only for me but for my group as well.

The technical side of filming

The filming stage was rather different from the typical convention for technology as when you think of film production you think of big high-tech cameras and lights. However, my group used our cellphones because some of the shots we had to do were rather risky for a big camera such as the running shots and especially the stare case shot that required the phone to be held over a drop of at least 30 feet. The cellphone in question that we used was an iPhone XR.

Through this, I feel that my group both learned that incorporating lighting in a shot can be extremely tedious.

I feel like this picture in particular shows this the best as the tedious light above that door created so much glare onto the camera and we had to adapt accordingly since we are filming in our school and we do not have control over the lights or anything like that.

Luckily for my group, we are all well-experienced in filming with a camera and also our telephones due to the plethora of filming projects we were assigned throughout our time in Media Studies.

All of our shots were original and were created following standard convention for most films, we did not really take any ideas from films as far as our shots were concerned. We wanted to be original but also be normal and not too over the top.

Hardship

To talk about our experience and the great challenge we had ahead of us, I need to take you back two weeks to the 28th of  February when I seen this.

(

This became an immediate problem as in every written and verbal plan for filming I was the main role playing Darren. Normally, this would be no problem we simply put off shooting until I'm better; however, this project is time-sensitive and we MUST use the time allowed for filming, no more no less. So as a quick solution we had to use one of our group members (Kendrick) who was expected to be the cameraman, now turn into the main actor. Though this is a major problem concerning the filming this wasn't the only difficulty we faced on the way.

I'd say the biggest problem for me was not being in school to help out, there was very little I was able to do as I was extremely sick to the point where I was almost bed-written so it became extremely hard to collaborate with the group. Nevertheless, under no circumstance would I want to become dead-weight so I compensated why overviewing all the shots and I would commonly set alarms to wake up during the time we would be in class so I could speak to my members through text so I was still caught up in the loop. In addition, I also picked up the role of doing voiceovers for all the shots and dealing with the sound in order to make up for my absence.

The good ending

Though all of this sounds extremely negative, there was still lots of good in it. These were found in the form of viewing all of my group members having fun with filming. I'd say the funniest part was waking up to seeing at least 20 videos being sent to me via text message of all the shots that were taken that day and you could hear the laughter of everyone as they were filming. Even though I wasn't there to experience, I know everyone had fun as did I looking back on these shots. Unfortunately, these videos are no longer available as they were all deleted as we prepare all of our final sots for the editing section of our project.