Thursday, 6 February 2014

Wednesday 5th February 2014- Filming scene 1

Today we decided to film scene one. Scene one shows a teenage boy called Mitchell scrolling through his Facebook profile when nasty messages begin to pop up on his screen. He then closes the messages and shuts his laptop but then his phone begins to ring from an ‘unknown’ number. Mitchell doesn’t answer the phone call and at the end of the scene you see Mitchell starring at a bottle of alcohol and pills his window ledge. We wanted to use a teenage boy in this scene because typically ‘cyber bullying’ is known to affect girls, but we wanted to show that it also affects young boys and as a result can end in them trying to harm themselves.

Whist filming I had taken on the role of camera person and directing the actor in the scene alongside the rest of the production crew. These included filming a range of long shots, mid-shots and close up shots, and also filming from a range of angles to ensure that the shots looked professional. The first shot that we took was a long shot of Mitchell walking through his front door. We started with this shoot because we wanted to show him walking in from school and walking up to his bedroom. Before filming in his bedroom we firstly had to show how he got there, and therefore this included filming Mitchell walking up the stairs from both the bottom and the top of the stairs, and also him walking into his room from outside and inside the room. All of these shots were either mid or long shots as we wanted to show the whole of Mitchells body so that the audience can get a better understanding of the character by his clothing and the way he is walking/facial expressions.
We then went on to film inside Mitchell’s room. We firstly got a shot of Mitchell sitting on his bed and opening his laptop. We used a mid-shot for this as we wanted to be able to see Mitchell opening his laptop and sitting on his bed. We filmed this shot twice as in the first shot the door wasn’t closed, and when Mitchell walked into his room he had shut the door. Therefore we filmed this shot again, this time making sure the door was shut. After this we then filmed close up shots of the conversation on Facebook. Looking back at these shots they aren’t as clear as we had hoped and therefore we should have filmed three times, or checked over the footage to ensure that it was clear. As a result we may have to film this shot again if we want to include a close up shot of the conversation. We also took close up shots of the phone when it was ringing, and Mitchells face to show that he was upset about the nasty comments being said to him. Lastly we used a long shot to show Mitchell looking at the alcohol and pills in his room to show how the nasty comments have lead him to wanting to harm himself.

I believe that we worked well as a team because we all added our own ideas into the shots, and had an input into where we wanted to put the props and also where we were going to place the camera in each shot. We also all took in turns filming each shot so that we were all able to test our camera skills and take different shots at different angles. To improve I believe that we should have filmed every piece of action three times as we then would have been able to ensure that we would get a professional looking piece of footage, and that the shot would not be blurry or the camera wouldn’t be shaky. Also we should have checked the over the footage that we had filmed as in one shot you were able to see the camera in the reflection of the mirror. Therefore if we had checked over the footage during filming we could have re-filmed this scene. Although, we did include a range of shots and also filmed from a range of angles so that you could see what the character was doing, and also their facial expressions throughout. Next time we would ensure that we film the same piece of action three times or more and also check over each piece of footage after filming.  

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