Filming my scripted video

Hi everyone,

So recently I have been filming the footage for my short video. I was originally helping my partner edit a video she had shot. However, I decided to film my own footage to catch up on work that I had missed so I would not be behind. I was given a script and brief for guidance. With this I was able to understand what it was I was aiming to achieve and plan ahead of filming. This gave me the opportunity to edit my work before shooting and change any necessary scenes to get the most out of this assignment. After planning where, when and how I was going to film, I began to create my story board. This gave me an effective overall plan for filming and made shooting much easier and controlled. I added lots of detail including time frames, edits, camera shots and dialogue. This is the storyboard I created:

 

 

When I was filming there were several problems I encountered. When I found a problem I did my best to try and resolve it, making my final footage much more effective and believable. Some of these problems were:

 

• Blurred footage - When I began to edit, I realised that some of the footage I had shot was blurred. I tried to choose the best quality clips to use in my final video so that it would look the most effective. In the future I will resolve this problem by having a number of retakes and checking the quality before beginning to edit.
• Quiet Speech - When it came to edit my footage some scenes that included dialogue were quiet or muffled. This made it difficult when splicing together different scenes as the volume was different on each frame. To overcome this during editing I altered the volume to try and equalised volume across the range of scenes.
• Uncontrolled movements - I found filming footage that involved camera movement much more difficult than still frames, especially on tracking shots. This was due to the handheld movement involved in a tracking shot. I found that the camera was difficult to hold steady when walking (something I also found when shooting my experimentation of movement video). In the future I will attempt to resolve this by using something similar to a dolly, such as a wheeled trolley.
• Lighting - As I filmed the surroundings gradually became darker which was noticeable between frames. This was because of the time of day so to resolve this I added a black and white filter when outside, which was useful in making my video much more sinister. In shots that were filmed inside, I also used a tint to create a darker setting.
• Low angled shots - When filming I found that trying to shoot a low angled shot was difficult due to my tripod only going to a certain lowest point. To resolve this I used the ground as a platform to control the steadiness of the footage and achieved an effective low shot.

 

Overall, this filming experience was the most effective as I was able to use a script to form the basis of the storyline, instead of an unstructured video. This gave me the opportunity to choose an effective location for a dark themed movie, experiment with a range of shots/movement and use Mise En Scene such as make-up and costume.

 

Thanks, Millie