Filming Day 1

I am going to be filming my short film out of sequence, and by this I mean that the order I shoot the scenes in will not be chronological with the order of the scenes of the narrative. The reasons for this are primarily due to the availability of my family on certain days and so I need to be adaptable in order to fit my shooting schedule around when they have free time. 

For the first day of filming, I decided to shoot the second part of my Big Mead scene, where Dylan has lowered the gun and is following the Father and Son. The crucial thing about shooting in a non-linear way is to remember the continuity for when I shoot the scenes which would precede this in the narrative. The main reason for filming this scene first was because my nan was visiting and I thought that the Mead would be the best place out of all my filming locations to use her for a cameo appearance, just as someone on a morning stroll in the local park, adding credibility to the setting as a public place. 

Since this was my first day on location filming, it was a surreal experience of both experimentation and calculated decision making, using my storyboards as a rough starting point but also trying out new ideas with the setting and a variety of other possible shots. Once filmed, I loaded my SD card into my Macbook and uploaded all of the individual takes into iMovie, so that I could start by sorting through the ones which were successful, and disregard the cuts that were ineffective. 

The screenshot above displays the iMovie software as a blank canvas, and so far all I have done is imported the day's footage into 'My Media', which allows me to drag shots from this area into the timeline. Overall I came away with 42 individual takes from my three hours of shooting (a length I hadn't anticipated) some of which were shots from my storyboards whilst others were unplanned and improvised when I got there, but still made for some great visual variety. 
Of the 42 takes from today, I am eliminating 14 of them straight away. Some of these shots were too shaky and detracted from the clarity of the image, others framed the characters in a way that didn't capture them fully, whilst the rest were simply bloopers where the cast (myself included) failed to maintain a straight face when the camera rolled.  

With the 28 clips that remained, I dragged them all onto the timeline and arranged them in a chronological way so that the editing would be easier from a narrative perspective. In total, all of my raw, unedited footage comes to a length of 6 minutes and 22 seconds. Bearing in mind that some of the clips are just different takes of the same shot, I am confident that I will be able to cut this down to a suitable length. 

I have trimmed each clip at the start and the end so that the shouts of 'action' and 'cut' are no longer present, and this alone has majorly reduced the total length of the sequence so that now it is just under four minutes. The next step, which will significantly reduce the running time, is to select one take for the shots where I have more than one. I already filmed 5 different takes for the establishing shot, and so deleting the ones which aren't as impactful  will cut down the bulk of the duration. 

The reason I have reposted one of my storyboard sheets is to draw attention to Shot 44, because the drawing is the establishing shot introducing the 'new setting' framed in the screenshot above. I adapted the illustrated shot from just being a 'tilt down' and turned it into a pan as it was tilting down, panning from the forest towards the right to the characters walking into shot. The reason I filmed 5 takes was because I found the movement of the camera difficult to maintain, and so I experimented with the speed I was tilting and panning to make the motion seem continuous and not stunted. I also really like this shot because of how the natural lighting shines through at the end of the path. 

Above is shot 47 from the storyboard. It is another example of where I have recorded multiple takes which are capturing the same shot. I much prefer the framing of the second shot where my head and shoulders are clearly and centrally framed, tracking Dylan steadily. The first attempt, as you can notice, is a much messier close up because it fails to sustain a clear framing of the protagonist, so parts of my head have been cut out of the frame. 

With all of the extra takes deleted, I am left with a sequence which is now 1 minute and 55 seconds long. Reflecting on the day's work, I think that I am going to have to condense this scene down a lot considering I still haven't filmed all of the shots taking place here, meaning I will need to return to do some pickup shots at a later date and so extend the scene even more. Bearing in mind that currently this is taking up almost 2 minutes of my 5 minute film, I am contemplating rethinking my narrative plan.