That's a wrap! (Filming our performance...again)

Finally, we are done with our filming! Our second shoot was a success, relocating to Canbury Gardens in Kingston, a park along the riverside. This relocation immediately boosted our work as the park was a lot more scenic and beautiful in comparison to my house, and therefore we were happier with this shoot even before we started filming. We were also lucky in the fact that it was not as cold as our previous shoot (even though it was still extremely chilly), so that we could function.

We all took turns with the filming, using Grace's digital SLR as we do not currently have any cameras at school, and this made the quality of our film clearer. However, this means that the footage will be tedious to upload as the videos are much larger files. We also did not have a tripod or a dolly, so all of our tracking, which was the majority of our footage, was filmed handheld and this runs the risk of an extremely shaky camera.

All in all, I am extremely pleased of today as getting our performance done is a weight off our minds and we now know that if we work together as a group we can get everything we need to done. Also, leading up to the performance I was extremely worried about how it would look on camera given our first try, but I am not very relieved. We also got some  more pictures that could be used for the ancillary tasks, which is good.

One thing that was vitally important in our work was ensuring that we had a good variety of shots and angles. We knew from feedback on our previous footage that we hadn't done enough close ups and we made this a priority. One shot I was particularly proud of, however, was a 360° shot that did a full circle around Connor and ended up back with him singing. 

Filming our performance! (finally)

We set out today with the intention of filming Connor walking through the park and singing at the camera. However, the weather was so unbelievably terrible that we were all frozen through and this not only affected Connor's performance, but also our ability to hold a camera! We tried for as long as possible, running through the song a couple of times but we found that between the cold and him trying to remember the lyrics without any visual prompts, the shoot was not going to go well. We decided to head back to my house, which was local, and maybe slightly change our idea to Connor sitting at home and not knowing what to do with himself now that the girl is gone. This meant we could get the lyrics up for him through an off-camera TV screen and also allow us all to thaw.

We got a few shots and hopefully a few photographs which we can use in our ancillary tasks, but overall the shoot was not really a success. In the end we decided to review the footage we had captured in the upcoming week, but also to schedule another shoot in for the following Friday as we knew what we had got today was adequate at best. Despite this, the sense of relief we had afterwards, knowing we had some footage, was beautiful.

Reshoot

Today we filmed a pick up for our aerobics scene. Unfortunately, during the hectic first shoot, we had not captured a shot that was good enough for the transition. We decided to change the idea of our transition from a continuity door edit to the lead girl putting her hands over her face and when she takes them off, she's in the next era. 

We were quite lucky in the fact that we only needed the one character for this as the preparation and organisation for the 80s shoot was extremely difficult and would be near to impossible to do again. Instead, we just filmed me running towards the door, coming through it, and putting my hands over my eyes and sliding to the floor.

Grace was actually ill the entire day of this shoot, so sadly she could not join us. She will help us edit it all and approve the footage, although we did FaceTime her so she could see what was happening! 

Filming #5 *ADD PICTURES*

We've just filmed the 1940s scene, set in a bomb shelter. We filmed inside a crawl space inside a roof, replicating the cramped conditions of bomb shelters in WWII. We plan to use an external shot of a bomb shelter that I currently have in my back garden in order to set the scene, and then use what we shot today as the interior.

It was a fairly successful shoot: we had lots of fun and filming by candlelight gave a really nice ambient look to our footage. However, we did have to be extremely careful as we were filming inside a wooden roof and lighting and relighting candles many times. Luckily, the smoke alarm was all the way downstairs so we didn't set it off!

As always, we tried to replicate authentic costumes of the time. I wore my hair in plaits with a floral dress, knee high grey socks and a cream cardigan. We thought this was quite iconic of children at the time of the 1940s. To compliment this, we also had an authentic gas mask box and old teddy bear, although we aren't sure how well these have shown up on film.

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*Insert Date* - Update.

We have now successfully finished our 1940s scene! We filmed in my back garden outside - unfortunately, the timing was horrible as we had to film in the snow, and the dress I was wearing was not very warm at all. The shoot - luckily - was a quick one and I am proud of the footage I got.

For this scene I had to run in on the left side of the frame (as I had run out the right side of the previous shot) and go into the bomb shelter. After a couple of takes, we also decided to start experimenting with shaking the tripod to create the effect a bomb is hitting. I think this looked really good on camera, and we are looking forward to editing it. 

Filming #4

Today we filmed the 1920s scene. We went to Grace's grandmother's house because she had decor we felt was representative/we could dress up to be representative of the age. We used break time and one of our free periods to go down into New Malden and shoot, taking many many bags of clothes and equipment with us.

In general it went well, also I didn't feel like we got enough close ups nor that the scene was storyboarded to the right depth. However, looking back over the footage I think it looks suitably authentic and the shoot generally went well.

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COSTUME:For our 1920s scene we had put so much care into the costumes of the era. The four of us having previously studied 'The Great Gatsby', a novel set in this era, meant we were all knowledgeable about the fashion at the time and we had some great conversations about the best way to represent this. We wanted to dress up as high end 1920s women, as not only would this be a lot easier and more fun, but we could bring together the mise en scene for it much better aswell. I was also lucky in the fact that my family had kept an extremely old, handstitched velvet coat from the 1920s which belonged to my great-grandmother, which we also used in the scene.

MISE EN SCENE:
To properly connote that this was the 1920s, mise-en-scene was also imperative. Luckily, Ellen's grandparents owned a silver service from the era, which was the centerpiece of the table in our scene and really brought the whole shoot together.

During the 1920s the Prohibition was also in place: alcohol was illegal and only the higher classes with connections to gangsters could get alcholic drinks. We had dressed like the upper class, so it only made sense we followed this through, using the silver martini goblets and a cleverly placed Champagne box in the background to connote this.