Video Diary

5/1/13
The filming of the urban/action media assignment started today. We were feeling rather confident after our preliminary task which we done in October but the mistakes and problems that we encountered then helped us gain the experience when filming. As we have gained valuable knowledge from the criticisms of our preliminary task, we have been able to avoid certain errors or causes of errors to ensure the filming process runs smoothly. For example in the preliminary task, we had failed to abide to the 180 degree rule where I looked to have suddenly switched positions. Now we are being extra cautious of our positioning when filming.
 
7/1/13
 Today, we decided to start filming the end of our opening two minutes where Aran receives a phone call for his next mission. We started with the ending because the rest of the filming had to be at night and we were all available during the day so we could at least make a start. Filming itself only took about an hour for this specific section but costume was as important today as we needed to make sure Aran's character didn't giveaway too many clues so we decided to dress him in all black. Our location for the ending of our two minutes was on a bridge located in Leatherhead over the M25. Aran was the only one needed in this scene where he received a phone call giving him his next target. We used a number of shots including close-ups, extreme close-ups and medium shots as well as long shots. The reason for this is because we want to have that element of choice when editing where we can see which shots better as opposed to having one standard shot.

Here is a picture of the bridge at the time of filming overlooking the M25.

                                                 
   What today was also used for was getting grips with the camcorder which I had acquired. The good thing about this camcorder was that it has a specific feature called anti-shake which reduces the amount the camera shakes but we will find out whether this is an effective process during the editing stage in a few weeks. We do have a trigram but thanks to the anti-shake, we didn't really have any use for it but we may need it when we actually begin filming the action scenes.

This is the camcorder we used which also had HD  as well as anti-shake.