Practice Shoot 1

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED + WHAT I CAN APPLY

We decided to do a practice shoot, which was useful to know specifically how to work with the different functions of the camera, what to do in terms of cinematography and how to decide when to do hand-held footage and when to do the shots with the tri-pod.



From this practice shoot, we learned a lot of different things. This shoot is also the reason for why we changed our idea.

On my blog, I did a link list for every single time we changed our idea. The initial idea of group pitch 1, was to have the girl being kidnapped in a dark parking lot under a huge shopping mall. The first scene would be filmed in the shopping mall, which is the bit that you see here.

The shot that we did first of her shoes and then another pair of shoes was used at first to denote that the killer was moving closer and closer. However, we noticed very quickly that our audience got confused with which shoes were which because they were both black and white. The shots were also very short, so for some it turned out to be confusing whether it was another pair of shoes or just the same.
Furthermore we discovered that it was really hard to work with the ambient sound, since there was such a loud diegetic sound within the mall. We used several different camera angles, such as establishing shots, mid-shots, close-ups etc., which ofcourse than also created a different ambient sound in every single shot.

Moreover, there was a problem with continuity, since we would need to film in the mall over some days in order to finish all the scenes. This would mean that there would be different people in every shot and that we would create a problem with continuity.

Also, we thought it would be really hard to create tension in a mall. We would have had to work a lot more with non-diegetic soundtrack and thought that even if it would be good it would still be hard to emphasise on the horror genre. In the coursework we have now, we used a good location and especially at the ed we got to build up quite a lot of tension.

What we did learn through this practice shoot was how to use the SONY camera, in terms of zoom, shallow and deep focus. We got to practice a bit on how to retach and detach it from the tri-pod, which was also very useful so that we wouldn't lose time with that at our real shoot.
Lastly, we learned how we should always come together so that everyone would suggest which camera angles to use. This allowed us to have a great shot variety.