Filming our short piece

In our Media lessons, we have now progressed to the point where we have finished creating our storyboard, using still images to show how we will show that we can use the 180 degree rule, shot reverse shot and match on action.

We decided that a simple and easy thing to film would be the end of a poker game, our piece consisted of Alex returning from the toilet to the poker game, only to find that Rachel (me) had cheated and changed their cards, resulting in her winning and having a 'royal flush'.

To start with we filmed Alex entering the room through the door from the corridor, so we saw the back of him as he entered. We then stopped the recording and repositioned the camera on the inside of the room, to re-film Alex entering, but so that we would be able to edit the film and keep continuity. We filmed this happening from different angles so that when we uploaded the footage onto the computers we could decide which looked smoothest. After we filmed Alex sitting down, we then repositioned the camera for 'over the shoulder' shots, positioning it so that we could see the tips of one players cards, and the face of the opposing player. We did this for both players, whilst a short sentence of dialogue was spoken by each. Once both players had played their cards to reveal the winner of the game, we moved the camera and zoomed in on the money in the center of the table, so that all was in shot was the money, and Rachel's hands reaching in and pulling it towards her.

However, once we felt happy that we had recorded all the footage we needed, we went to upload this footage onto the Mac computers, only to find that we had made a very basic error, but one that was to mean we had no usable footage. It turned out that when we had thought we had pressed 'record', we had actually pressed 'stop record' and vica-versa. It was a simple error to make, but meant we had to spend the next lesson filming the entire thing again, quite the disaster really.

We have now managed to finish our filming, and are now ready to finally start editing the piece to look how we want, a little behind schedule, but all part of the learning process i guess =)

x

Creating our storyboard

Today was our fourth lesson of Media Studies. In previous lessons we have learned to use the digital equipment that we will be recording with, and got used to the different types of shots that we can use whilst filming or taking photographs.

Me, Alex and Lauren worked together in a group to create a short film showing the different types of shots we could use to show that we understood them, and we did this during lesson time around the school. In our two lessons today we learned a bit more about the 180 degree rule and began to think how we would put this into practise in a short film.

We created and used a rough storyboard to help us plan and show how our film will run, deciding on filming two people playing cards, and using different shots and angles from within the 180 degree area to show the people. We then took still photos that we will later insert into a storyboard on the Mac computers before we continue to film our piece.

When taking the still photos, we quickly began to get a good idea of what angles worked well and showed what we were aiming to achieve with our film, however we also learned what angles did not work as well as we thought they would, and how we could improve these shots by repositioning. An example of this is when we were trying to show a picture of the top of my playing cards, with the camera positioned over my shoulder, whilst also including Alex's 'poker face' in the shot.

In the next few lessons we hope that we will progress to finish our storyboards and begin to film our short piece.

Bye for now! x

Very first post!

This is my first post for my media blog. I have just finished creating my site but think it will definitely need some more tweaking! As we begin our media work and projects, I will be updating this blog with the way in which we are progressing, any errors or problems we come across, the reasoning behind the decisions we are making and what we think works best!

Bye for now x