Primarily, the first thing that has to be mentioned about my experience with this task is that it has made me appreciate just how much work really goes into every single part of film making. Because of this, I now have a better informed and more realistic view of time frames for making just 2 minutes of film and therefore feel far more prepared for creating our final piece which will hopefully be of a high quality when we improve upon the things that didn't work well and apply the new techniques will learnt.
When we began to think about the task and start drafting a storyboard for shots, I think it's safe to say that we all thought it would be a lot simpler to produce the 2 minute clip than it resulted in being. Because of this, whilst we we're coming up with a lot of ideas, they were not very structured and this resulted in us becoming rather confused when it came to the initial filming. However, I also think it allowed us to be a little more impulsive when filming to develop better shots that fitted to the style we were trying to create. So in terms of this, I think that one of the key aspects I myself learnt here was that planning can only take you so far - plan too much, and it can limit on the spot creativity. But that does not be that planning should be neglected all together.
At the start of filming, we began to make some crucial decisions that drastically affected what we produced - the location and the actors. Of course, we were limited to creating the film on the school grounds, which didn't fit too well with our genre. To improve this, we focused on the weather in the location we were shooting, taking into account the idea of pathetic fallacy. Filming only on overcast, rainy days fitted the mood of an action film far better than we could achieve for the location and so we relied on this to improve the setting. Luckily, it rained every single day of shooting!
Whilst shooting, we were highly conscious of applying the conventions of our genre to the way in which we produced the piece, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post. The aspects that we included were things such as shaky cam, short shot lengths and mise en scene that reflected the theme of the film. We switched roles constantly to give everyone a chance to get a feel for the camera, which I think will be good to know for our main task. If anything, things we could have improved upon were our time management, which would have enabled us to finish getting the shots we needed far quicker, and more importantly, our continuity. Mainly due to filming on site at school, we had to switch rooms for filming twice and on both days the lighting was consistently different. There were other, smaller inconsistencies but these were easier to miss.
