Shoot 1 - Evaluation

On our first shoot everyone arrived on time and we arrived at out first shooting location a little later.
Our first shot would include Shaun and Tom going from an ECU to a LS. This presented a few problems, first one being I had to walk backwards, so I couldn’t see where I was walking. We overcame this by having someone lead me while I kept the camera in position. Another problem was there was a lot of debris on the ground, We solved this by clearing the area of things big enough to trip over. Lastly, we found that we had to move the actors to lots of different locations to get the shot we wanted. After about 7 different takes I found the kind of shot I wanted to use. I chose this shot as it had very good framing for both actors shown, and was relatively easier to walk backwards down that line.
Another shot we had problems with were the scene with Tim sitting in the river. This was a difficult shot to do as we had to get Tom in the shot and framed to be in the upper right corner, to then pan downwards and left to get Tim framed in the lower right hand corner, This was hardest because we weren’t sure whether to use steadicam or use the tripod for this shot. We decided to do both, and found that the tripod being used made the shot look smoother, and so we used that.
After this we suggested that if Tim lay in the river that this would give a very disturbing look and so tried that. We tried this shot with both shirt on and off. We only did two takes of this as the river was very cold. A problem with this was that the shot with the shirt on gave his shirt an air bubble and didn’t look as good, so we had to use the shot with his shirt off, for this we had to amend the storyboard to include another body on the same stretch of river, occurring after the image of Tim lying against the bridge.
After we were finished in the woods we went to the graveyard to get Sophie’s corpse scene. First we filmed Tom entering the graveyard through a gate this presented a few problems as it was very hard to frame him correctly and still get the gravestones in. We decided to overcome this problem by shooting it again in another shoot.
When we finally got to Sophie’s scene we discovered that we had no battery left, this left us with no options but to do another shoot at a later date.
From this shoot we learnt the effectiveness of the leading lines and how to frame a shot correctly. If done again I would have tried to keep the walking back shot steadier and would have taken more batteries. However we got the majority of our filming done and were on schedule to get our opening sequence done by the deadline.