Shoot 3 - Evaluation

This was our final shoot. To ensure that all actors were on time and able to attend, I called all actors on Monday, then again Friday night, and the following Saturday morning as we really needed to get this shooting done. To get Sophie to the shoot I had to pick her up at her house for 10, then, met Tim at the Pembury bus stop at 10 past 10. Tom then arrived at 20 past 10 which was a little late. I then received a call from Shaun saying that he couldn’t attend, so I asked him whether he could leave his jumper in his porch for me so that I could pick it up and use it, so my little brother could wear it and look like Shaun to the audience. After this I then heard from George that he could not come either. After this quite stressful turn of events we made our way down to the location, being the shack for the end scene.
When we got there we had to clear a good opening to get to the shack as in the first shot Tom had to lift his leg quite high to get there which kind of spoilt the mood I was going for.
In the shack the camera gave a snowy effect inside the shack, I overcame this by hanging my coat over a hole in the wall, stopping some of the light from coming into the shack, this seemed to solve it and made the shot inside the shack a lot clearer.
I then tried to get a shot of Sophie, Tim and ‘Shaun’ in the shack all in the same shot without panning, This was very hard as I had to do a lot of takes to frame the actors right, but still get a reasonable amount of each actor in the shot, I then settled on all three crouching in a corner.
After this I then filmed Sophie and ‘Shaun’ doing a variety of creepy looking actions. These included twitching, moving their hair with their hands slowly and looking up jerkily in synchronisation.
I then filmed Tim reading the book with a jerky head movement, and made him look creepier by getting him to open his eyes really wide giving him a more possessed look. I then panned down during this shot to show him reading a book with words associated with horror scratched on. Then I filmed him turning the pages of the book, to the last one saying ‘They’re here’ which I thought causes suspense and adds a little more to the enigma. I also added fake blood to give a scarier effect to the scene.
After this I decided to get a shot tracking into Tim’s face. I went from a low shot to over Tom’s shoulder then into Tim’s face, with him then quickly looking up into the camera for a shock value. I did a smooth, and a shaky shot of this both in steadicam. The shaky shot will look good with music building up behind it and the smooth shot can maybe sped up and look more fluid so I did a couple of takes of both style.
After I got the end scene done, we walked down to the graveyard to get Sophie’s ‘corpse’ scene done. To not mess with continuity too much I re-filmed Tom entering the graveyard and had a variety of shots of him walking through the graveyard, using tombstones in the foreground for the variety of the shots to give a good effect. I then filmed Tom walk past Sophie laying on the ground with two takes of Sophie in the lower left hand corner, and one of her in the upper left hand corner. This was to get either the tombstone in shot, or something in the foreground. This can then be chosen later in editing.
After that I got a montage of Sophie’s face in a variety of CU shots to then later be edited, and I had finished for the day.
From this last shoot I learnt that you can ‘cheat’ continuity if you have to and that using cheap methods to get shots you want can still leave you with quality footage.
We were very happy with this last shoot and are pleased with the footage we have collected.