Shoot Day

Shoot Day

It was Sunday morning, I woke up and thought to myself "I have school tommorow". It wasn't a good feeling but then it hit me. "We are shooting our long awaited thriller film introduction" I felt incredible. Just the thought that I was going to do something that I do in my spare time on an actual school day filled my heart with joy. It's not just any usual stuff either we were going to be using be using a green screen which is feature of media i have always wanted to learn. On top of that I would be working with a group of people which is good work ethic and experience for the future when you have to work in groups.

(The day of the shoot) There we were standing there at our long awaited shoot and it couldn't of gone any better! Well apart from being extremely cold outside!You can't change the weather unfortunately! We started the day by going up into the media suite with another group that was shooting. We discussed our plans and headed down to build the set up. We began on the "roof" set we used crate pallets

and managed to find some roofing felt to lay on top. This matched up with the flooring outside to help with the illusion.

We then began on lighting the green screen. We took out a blonde spotlight and shone it onto the screen. Now from the naked eye it looked perfect however when looking through the camera. It picked up a concentrated area of light and looked awful. We decided to use some tracing paper to disperse the light more this fixed the concentrated light but unfortunately made the room too dark.

At this point we got two red heads out on shone it on It was perfect! We got the actor up on the "roof" and at first the lighting looked fake we needed it to match the stock image of the city so we used a large piece of polystyrene to dull the light. This unfortunately didn't work so we resulted to using a reflecting pad. Once shone in an accurate direction gave the best effect. I jumped on the camera, Thomas and Eloise gave the actor his lines and the situation and away we went.

The fan we were using to make a fake breeze was in the wrong direction I suggested moving it to the side and the tie started moving and it made the part!

We continued doing different scenes as my experience with green screens kept growing and seeing just how much work is behind what they do in the real films.

We had done all the green screen shots now we had to switch to the reverse shots. For this we used the outside of a building as it looked like the roof of a building (well sort of) it helped when we put down the roofing felt outside to match the flooring inside and again we started on the filming. For this scene we needed Adam as he was the gunman that gets revealed towards the end.

So again we started on the briefing to the actors and what they were going to say. This was Eloise's job so away she went whilst I set up the camera. I began shooting the scenes whilst Thomas held onto the boom microphone to get up and close with the characters dialogue (it was quite windy outdoors) After a few shots I decided to switch with Thomas as I had used the camera quite allot and it was nice changing roles and doing something new. I learnt how to hold a boom and what input to put it in on the camera.

Overall I really enjoyed the shoot and am looking forward to editing it and seeing the final outcome for others to enjoy which is what it's all about and what I enjoy the most about film making. I have learnt so much about greenscreens and how they work now but if I was to change anything I would of brought a charger for my camera as it ran out of charge so the time lapse ran quite short.