What Did You Learn About Practical Film Production?
Roles within the group/My role as a producer

When we first filmed a short sequence at the begginging of the year, I found it quite challengimg to film different shot types, but this helped to prepare me for filming our thriller.
On our shoot day, members of the group, took it in turns to film different shots, so we all got experiance. Some of the group, such as the Assistant Director and Creative Director, contributed far less than the Producer and Director.
As a producer, I feel I contributed a lot on the day and filmed some good footage. The Director also played a very prominant role, and made sure that everything was kept in order.
As well as learning directly about filming, I have also learnt a great deal about teamwork because of the many problems we have faced within our group. I now know how to work with people I do not get along with, and as time progressed working with them has got easier, but it was very challenging at the beggining. I feel that the whole thriller process would have been more successful, had we been able to choose our own groups.

Shoot Day Continued

CAMERAWORK



We used a large variety of shots in our filming, most of which were well thought out and composed. We filmed the same shot several times, from different distances and perspectives, so we had more varied footage to work with.
The shots of Ffion were filmed, at a much, more rapid speed than those of the twins, to show the contrast, thereby telling the story. I think the rapid shots, are the most effective as the make the film more exciting and add tension. A particular good shot we used, was running backwards with the camera, filming the feet running, as it was more mysterious (as you could not see who was running) and showed the franticness that we wanted to portray in our film. For theses shot, we used a handheld camera, so we could follow the movement better, as oposed to having the camera on a tripod, like we did for the rest of our shots. The handheld shots were more challenging to do, and it took a while to get the shot right, but when we had grasped how to do it, it looked very effective.
All our shots were filmed exterior, with the majority filmed, in the woods, although the location within the woods did vary between shots. We wanted to show a journey through the woods, so we found different areas of the woods, and filmed the twins going through each area. We then filmed Ffion in each location, to show that she was following the children. The one other location we used was the house (Broome Hall). We only filmed a couple of shots here, to go at the start of our film. These were an establising shot of the house, and a couple of shots of Ffion, running out both the front and back of the house.

LIGHTING

We didn't use any artificial light in our film, it was all done using the natural light of the surroundings. As the day progressed, it got darker, and this was when I think the shots looked the best. If we had thought about it more carefull, we should have started filming later in the day, so all the shots were more dark and therefore looked more scary. The changes in natural lighting therefore could have affected our shot continuity as the weather changed, but looking at the footage this does not appear to be a problem

MISE-EN-SCENE

Our film was done, very simply and there weren't any props involved. We asked one of the twins, to dress in normal clothes and one to dress in white to appear more ghostlike. However because of the cold conditions, the 'ghost' child, kept a jumper on for filming, which made her look less ghostlike.
The general composition of the shots was good and the woods were chose to film in, provided a lot of variety.