Improvised Filming Equipment

Whilst Alex and I mostly have the correct filming equipment for this short film, there are going to be some occasions when we will need to improvise our filming equipment since there are certain scenes which will require filming techniques which are not possible to be filmed without the help of additional equipment. Examples of scenes in our short film which will require specialist methods include the scene where the characters are running through the woods, the underside shot of the car and the ending aerial shot.

Alex and I took our time off school one day to go up to the filming locations to test out potential options for filming these scenes which we may have. For the chase scene, we originally going to hire a dolly cam to track our actors whilst they are running past the trees. The solution to how we overcame this issue was by Alex driving in his car at the same speed as the actors running and me sitting in the passengers seat filming at the same time. The photographs below show the planning we have made so far for this shot. 

The actors would be standing the opposite side of the line of trees whilst we drive alongside the actors

In terms of the underside shot, we figured out to attach my GoPro Hero 5 Black in the middle of the road whilst being supported with a couple of sturdy items to prevent the camera from falling forward as the car drives above it at a high velocity. For the sake of the photograph, we used sellotape as this was all we could find to demonstrate the method we are thinking of using!

In addition, for the aerial shot, we improvised our equipment so much to make this shot as close to a genuine aerial shot as possible. We originally thought that it would be preferable to rent out a filming drone to record this last scene, but after looking at our over spent budget for this film so far, we realised that we will need to think of a new method for this ending shot. The solution I managed to come up with would be to strap the GoPro on the boom pole of the RODE Microphone. The long extension of the pole would be high enough for the GoPro to simulate an aerial drone shot, whilst the image stabilization technology of the camera would help stabilise the footage more which will match the stable aerial shot normally achieved on a very expensive drone camera.

Alex and I wish to adhere to the conventions of the impressive cinematography shots made for the Action/Adventure films we have researched (James Bond, Batman etc.). These shots will hopefully make our audience more interested in our short film and will hopefully be asking questions about in the future about how we exactly pulled off these shots.