Production Update - David

As a group we have been shooting our short film for two weeks now. Each filming session we made sure to write up a shooting script before hand to inform ourselves along with our teacher on where we were, what we planned on filming and what time we should start and finish. Each session went well as we made sure to bring along all appropriate pre-production planning, such as storyboards and any other notes we had made with ideas. This meant that when we were off shooting we knew what we wanted to get done and therefore we didn't waste any time wondering what to do, however this also meant that once the main things we wanted done were done, any additional ideas could either be noted down for next session, or if we had time we did it during that session. This meant that we gained quite a lot of footage, which gave us more of an opportunity to create more original and individual versions of our short film when editing individually.

After we felt like we had collected enough footage, we then put it onto our computers and reviewed what we had filmed. This was when we had to decide on which shots needed to be redone due to either technical faults (such as bad framing, of being out of focus) or concept-wise it wasn't clear (whether we needed more dialogue for example, to give the film more narrative and/or understanding). At first it was quite clear that some of our footage would have to be redone, mainly due to small technical faults, such as the pan being too fast. This was our next aim; we made note of what shots had to be redone and how to improve them, then during our next session we reshot them. 

Repeating our previous step we checked the new footage, and as we were happy with it we started to individually edit our films. When editing, we all started to notice that our film was lacking slightly in terms of narrative and duration - we wanted our films to be around 4-8 minutes, while some of ours were barely reaching 3 minutes. We then decided as a group that clearly more filming would have to be done when returning from the christmas break, we came up with a starting idea on what we wanted to do, in which I created a short storyboard for and other planning notes. 

Now that we have come back from our christmas break we have immediately got on with doing more filming. During our first filming session we confirmed with each other on what we wanted filmed and then did it - making sure to get more angles and shots of the same scene. Although we had done this previously, we did it even more this time to make sure we had a lot of options on what we could use within our films. We have now finished all planned filming, and next lesson we plan to review the footage, decide whether we need to do any final filming sessions and if not then we will use our new footage while editing and this will hopefully be our last step in creating our short films.