Whilst making our short film extract from the middle of our whole film there were many difficult and challenging things about the shooting of the scene that our group had decided to do as we were slightly ambitious with some aspects of our film and the location we were filming in had quite a few problems with it/things inside which we couldn’t really move so we ended up having to work with half of a room which was quite a small area.

Even though there were many problems with the room and the way we were going to film some parts of the 2 minute extract it was still an enjoyable thing to do and I personally think paid off.

I have already mentioned that the room was quite a small area and that we were only using half of it which meant that I was slightly more restricted with the things that I could do with the camera however we still went for all of the shots that I wanted to do and that the director thought was a good idea to film in such a way.

The first part of the extract is shot in dark to give that part of the film an eerie effect and to make it so that there is a lot of mystery about what is going on and where the character is at or what has happened to him however this could have gone wrong as if I had jogged the camera whilst the light was off and the camera was recording then I would have missed this however it was quite a simple scene to do so it would have been simple to re-shoot the scene this was also good due to the fact that the light of the zippo was enough to light Alex Tomkins face without being so bright that it didn’t make the area look like it was a run down place or as if there was nothing strange or even remotely scary about it.

Another shot within the scene that I think that went well or the best is the shot where you can only see half of his face as the other half is away from the light and completely in shadow which helps to symbolise that he is at the point where he doesn’t know whether he should carry on and if he does what will happen when he finally diverts his eyes over to the shadow which suggests that he Is giving up with the running and aiming to survive through the apocalyptic Britain.

Although I believe most of it went well there is one where I don’t think it went all that well as it was a moving shot and the only thing that I had to keep it steady was my arms which aren’t trained to stay still especially not whilst moving forwards towards something although I don’t believe that it went all that well it appears to have worked well in our film extract.

So even though it was hard to do it was worth the effort of attempting to do it. Another factor that made this shot so hard was that I hadn’t ever done anything like this before but as seen as the director basically left the shots down to me and so if it didn’t look o good then it was my fault which I believe made me work harder to go and do the best that I could do and then impress the director and come back with something that was actually worth the effort.

As I was the cinematographer I was working very closely with the director so that we can get towards what is mainly the directors vision or maybe even improve upon it by him telling both me and the actor what is going to happen in the shot and then I was able to setup the shot how it was that I thought would work well and then told the actor to do where to do what he had to do and where to look at to make it look good and to make it work properly.

I am not the only person who thought this as other members of different groups thought that this shot was effective and looked good.

Some of the feedback that I got back from other groups about the cinematography and I got some good comments such as “the shot with the lighter being the source of light is effective”.

However a less positive one was “the shot of the radio wobbles” however this was not easy to help as there was a part of the tripod that was loose and so the camera was at an angle or slightly wobbly in places.

Labels: Will