Short Film | Day 2

On 22nd December, Alex and I attempted filming our next lot of footage for the city scene. Since the last shooting day of the city scene back in November, Alex and I were certain that we need to re shoot some additional shots for this scene due to the poor weather conditions during the first day and also the lack of experimentation with camera shots. The next attempt of re shooting this scene would allow Alex and I to get another chance at shooting this scene and improve on the mistakes we made last time.

First of all, the weather was significantly better than last time. There was no rain at all and the cloud cover was just perfect with some sunlight eventually breaking through as the morning progressed. We were very fortunate with the weather this time round as this meant that there were not as many disruptions from the weather, such as rain, whilst we were filming. In addition, Alex and I arrived on set with our actor Harry 2 hours earlier than last time on set as this gave us both plenty of time to re shoot the footage we needed without also being disrupted by other members of the public since this was an issue we faced last time too.

The filming itself was a real success and we have now gathered enough footage from this scene to begin editing the first scene to our short film. We experimented more with different shots and have decided to stick with the shot of the camera pulling over Harry's shoulder as we had discovered from last time. This time around, we used both the DSLR camera as well as Alex's iPhone 6s which surprisingly captured amazing video footage despite it having only one lens inside the camera. The image stabilisation really improved the fluidity of the over the shoulder shot and tracking shot of Harry. On the downside however, the iPhone camera has no setting on removing the auto-saturation, which leaves me more work in post production to edit the footage in a more cinematic look.

As always on set, there were occasionally mistakes made whilst filming that disrupted the overall quality of our footage. The first example is of Alex walking right in front in frame, which was very amusing in the beginning. Another common error which occurred was when my finger was accidentally covering up the lens of the camera and therefore caused an inconsistent look to the footage.

Due to a lack of experimenting during the first film day, we wanted to take advantage of the extra time we had and beautiful weather too to experiment more with different camera shots. Here are two examples of experiment shots we played around with which might or might not make it into the final cut.

After several hours of filming, Harry eventually had to make his way over to work on that day. However Alex and I were very pleased with the overall success of this film day and we are both excited to begin editing our first batch of footage for our short film.