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 =)

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