Production notes

To be completely honest my shoot was done very last minute, so there weren't a lot of planing done beforehand.

The location of the action was the easiest part to sort out. Because I was thinking about how I will be able to film the extract/trailer for the project I wrote it in the semi deatached house in suburban neighbourhood, which is the kind of accomadation I live in so I decided to film inside and outside my rented house and getting the premission of my landlord took me just 5 minutes.

Casting also was the least of my problems, because I knew for some time that the character of Charlotte will be portrayed by my friend Gabrielė who as well studies at UCA. The character of Harold was a bit harder to find, but thankfully Logan agreed to help me out.

Because everything was very last minute I didn't have time to do any shot-listing, but because of short daylight hours I decided to film everything within two days. First day we did all scenes inside the house and the second day the rest of the scenes outside. While filmimg I kept reminding myself about the importance of coverage as well as a strategy to start filming wide shots and get closer.

Comments

DIRECTIONS

The magic 2 every director has to think about is: 1) what's in front of the camera 2) where's the camera positioned. It's important to read the script and break it down to questions: How? - style, mise-en-scene, mood. Who? - cast, crew, collaborators. Where? - locations, set. What? - production, costume, sound design, editing. Key director moments: How you pesent the character. Where you set the story. How you position the light. How you edit the story (rhythm, tone, mood). For our first Directions unit lecture we had to get into groups and have a go at directing a short scene. I found it to be very difficult to direct my DP instead of handling it myself. I ended up with a lot of spare shots I didn't need or couldn't use (mainly because it was hard to get the ball of paper to land into the bin) but the end result didn't disappoint me.

Camera workshop (coverage)

In one of our camera workshops we learned about the importance of coverage. It doesn't matter that in the end we won't use all of the footage and maybe even end up using just few shots, it's important to have multiple shots from diferent angles so that we would have options while editing. During the workshop we had two exercises. One of which was "The Chair": It ended up being pretty short video and I ended up not using half of the footage I got for it. For next exercise we were given scripts and had to interpret it in our own way. While editing I wished I would have filmed few more close up shots and to have actually filmed the whole scene from fixed camera positions.

Studio Idea

Personally, I found it really difficult to come up with an interesting studio production idea. But because "one idea is not enough" (Brown and Duthie, 2010) I came up with 3 initial ideas: 1) Guess the song type of game show, but instead of guessing pop songs, the contestants would have to guess classical music. I got this idea from a game my friends and I loved to play and the way my music teacher used to test my class. 2) Travel guide about how to make the most of your trip, places worth visiting and places that are overrated and not worth your time. I got this idea from my sister who travels a lot and from the way she does loads of research about each and every place she visits. 3) Debate/Game show where 2 groups of people debate about nerdy topics ( whats better Marvel or DC, which Doctor was the best etc.). The idea comes from noticing how much rivalry there is between comic book lovers and overall 'nerds'. I feel like this idea is the stronge...

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