Practice Shoot

The practicality of our shoot required a lot of thought. We were going to have three screens, and so we would need to shoot three pieces but with all of the timings of placing pieces in the middles to be synced up. We were initially thinking of filming each section individually and mapping out the timings separately and adding them together in post but we felt that this would massively over complicated everything and would be extremely time consuming.

As a solution to this we thought of filming everything at once, with three different cameras. We spoke to our tutor and to some technicians about the feasibility of matching up our footage if it was filmed on three different cameras and discovered that as long as the cameras were all the same and the settings on each one matched up, the footage should fit together seamlessly.

This would mean that we would be able to set up three cameras side by side and film everything real time so as long as we matched the beginnings of each piece, they should sync up perfectly.  

We booked out a studio and three cameras and tripods for an afternoon and evening, and spent the afternoon setting up before the actors arrived. The actors we used were two close friends of mine who have had experience working in student projects before and were eager to help out.

Myself and Nicole each bought in our props and set up the studio, using the white background and studios lights to create our shots. We asked the actors to come in black clothing, and kept the backgrounds to all the shots white to keep a nice monochrome balance to the work and making the colours of the props stand out more.

We had some trouble initially as one of the shots was required to be a birds eye view. This meant that one of the cameras had to be tilted  downwards as far as it would go and much closer to the props than the other cameras had to be to the actors. The camera, in fact, had to be positioned in front of the lights. This presented a whole lot of new problems with regards to shadows on the background, as all the individual frames were very closely aligned. We had to test out a lot of different lighting positions before we managed to find one that worked.

Before we even began filming, we ran through what would be happening in the piece several times to help the actors become familiar with what they needed to be doing.

We began by just going through the piece in sections, and repeating those and then fitting them together, allowing the actors to get used to what was happening, before eventually beginning to film.

We did several takes through the evening, so we would have a lot of material to work with. Due to already have rehearsed with the actors earlier, we managed to get through the filming relatively quickly as the whole piece is a couple of minutes long without any cuts, so all we had to do was run through it a couple of times and edit minor issues as they arose such as where the props were place in the frame and the like.

We also noticed afterwards that we had had some issues with framing. While before we began to film we set up each shot carefully, because it was all done in one take we sometimes forgot about checking the framing before we began to shoot again. 

When we looked back on the footage is it very obvious to us that we needed to raise the male actors camera up, as at times we cut of the top of his head, and also push the camera forward so the frame was closer to the top half of his torso so it matched the female actors shot.

We also didn't take into consideration the creases on the white sheet we used as the background which ruined the aesthetic of the piece.