Reflection ( First day of filming ) 3rd May

The first day of filming went really well because of the fact that I had everything in order in terms of having all my actors there with me so I was pretty much ready to film everything, I just had to check that my equipment was working, and we was ready to start to filming, unfortunately we encountered some weather problems for example it started raining and I didn’t know whether to continue to filming or not because I didn’t want to get any of the equipment wet because I borrowed it and I didn’t want to damage any of the equipment , so therefore I had to come to alternative where I had to use an umbrella to help shield the rain from the camera , the only downside to filming in the rain is that the camera slightly picked up the droplets of rain and also the camera picked up the sound of the rain . In my other reflection  I spoke about audio interference , that had to do with the microphone but , this particular audio happened while we was filming and it was the camera that picked up this particular sound interference which didn’t really matter too much when I was editing because you could still hear the dialogue that was said on camera .

When I was filming the classroom scene I could of filmed it much better in terms of me using different angles and shots for example I kept swinging the camera around to capture all the frames inside of me taking singular shots of everything to make my life 10 times easier because when I would of put it together but inside I filmed it all in one singular shot which was a huge mistake on my part because I made it harder for myself to cut to make it not seem like I was moving the camera about too much but unfortunately when I was filming I wasn’t thinking that big , it was my first short film that I had made so therefore I wasn’t exactly the best film in the world in terms of angles and framing because I only had one day to film and put everything together , so my mind was purely fixed on filming all the scenes I wasn’t thinking about how it would aesthically instead I was purely focused  on capturing everything on camera , and not how an actual film would look . which was definitely a down fall for me because I could of made this film much more technical if I had made a shot list that would of been much more helpful than me just driving straight into deep end and just go straight ahead and film things straight without proper preparation which is something I will talk about in another reflection.

Another thing I wanted to talk about is the actual camera operation when I first started essentially filming the settings of the camera wasn’t working for example when I first turned it on the cameras ISO was too bright , and i couldn’t figure out how to operate it properly , until I figured out it was the ISO playing up and all I had to do was the lower the ISO to a reasonable setting so that I could clearly see what was happening , and how I was going to see through it but I managed to sort it out by changing the settings on the ISO and then the camera was back to normal , but then another problem occurred when a piece of the top camera came off by the top of the lens which I thought could prevent us from filming but it ended up being fine because it was the rubber part of the lens which was like a protective part of the lens , I just managed to place it back on , but then another situation happened that I have mentioned in a previous reflection about how the screw to the microphone came off that is attached to the camera so therefore we had to result in using the camera audio which still picked up other sound interferences .

Another thing that happened while filming was the fact that whilst we was filming we had to be extra careful due to the fact that we had a real knife that I used as prop during the filming process so we had to consider the health and safety factors , because we was using an actual knife in the woods there was an actual possibility that someone could of mistaken it for an actual real altercation , if that had happened whilst we was filming then I would of had a huge problem because of the fact that someone could of got seriously hurt and that is not something anybody wants so in this case we made sure every time we shot a new take ( Scene ) , that we had the safety cover of the knife to be kept on at all times because during the scene there is actual physical contact so in that moment we had to make sure we filmed those particular scenes perfectly because of how of hazardous using an actual knife could be so as the director it was my job to make sure everything goes smoothly and too plan otherwise my whole short film would of went up in flames or I would had to change a lot of things last minute which I really didn’t want to do because of the fact that it would of been too much pressure .

In Conclusion the production side of things went really well but I still thought it could of gone a lot better in terms of my production skills , because of the fact that when I was filming I couldn't exactly get all the shots and angles that I wanted because of how time consuming everything was but I managed to cut and put what I could together by using some advanced technical skills such as after effects and premiere pro software to build up what was trying to achieve . Overall the editing stage was quite a different experience to had edited in the past due to the fact that , it was the first short film I had ever done so it was very experimental in terms of what I was about to accomplish .