Construction Post 3: Week 3 Production

During week 3 production we began to edit our studio shots as we hadn't filmed our on-location shoot yet.

Beginning the studio edit

The first priority for this was organisation, this is because when editing our test shoot we made the mistake of not naming our rushes. This made editing much more difficult as I often could not find the shot I was looking for and thus had to look at each individual clip till I found the desired take. This made editing the timeline much longer then needed.

In order to not make the same mistake, the first thing we did was to look through all our rushes and individually name the best takes. The names for each clip needed to detailed enough for us to instantly identify the clip without having to select it, but also short enough so the name was completely visible. An snippet of our named rushes can be seen below.

Rushes have names such as CU projection which immediately indicate its a Close up in the projection set up. 

Immediately naming the rushes proved to be extremely useful as it made the whole process of editing much more efficient and less stressful. I was able to instantly find specific takes which, in the long run, reduced the total amount of time spent assembling our basic time-line.

We also began to think ahead for our shoot during the weekend. For example we received feedback from our target audience and teachers that our video didn't flow well. In order to resolve this issue we tried to incorporate the two narratives together. Examples of this in our final video can be seen in the GIFs below. 

Zoom into eyes and fade into studio shot

Our artist pushes the camera into a pan which then dissolves into a studio shot

Our artist and the male narrative character do the same action, the shots are then cut back and forth between each other to achieve a mirrored effect

On-location shoot

Our first on-location shoot day started off with our actor arriving several hours late. We made the best out of this situation by discussing our ideas/plans for when our actor did arrive. This was a setback that we couldn't immediately fix, much like our setback involving the lights in the studio, so we just had to keep our energy up and attempt to make use of this lost time. In future projects I will definitely confirm the reliability of our actors before our shoot to prevent this type of issue from happening again. 

Since we had already shot in Shoreditch for our test shoot we knew the area quite well, we also liked specific locations within Shoredtich so we immediately returned to them to film. This made the remaining time we had of the day efficient in terms of finding where to shoot. However since Shoreditch is a constantly changing area due to the graffiti this came as a blessing as well as a curse. 

an alleyway with useful graffiti that we found during our test shoot 

we later returned to the same alleyway to film a separate shot

For example we wanted to redo a shot from our test shoot with the same graffiti however upon returning a few weeks later we found it had been painted over with less desirable art. Despite this we also found new graffiti which we then used in our main shoot. 

new graffiti allowed us to vary pre-existing shot ideas

Improvements from test shoot

After receiving feedback from our target audience and teachers we realized we needed to make our shots simply more interesting. In order to do this we had to vary out shot types and be more experimental in our sequence. 

In this shot I thought it would be a good idea to film a match on action through the fence to make the overall shot much more interesting.

Also our overall running sequence included a variety of shots which made it much more gripping to the audience. This difference can be seen in the GIFs below.

Test shoot running sequence

Main shoot running sequence

Overall despite the setback with our actor to begin with, I feel as if the main shoot week was much more efficient as we learnt a lot about the area and what camera movement would look good from our test shoot. Our experimental shots also work really well in our sequence and at the end of the week we were all left with quality footage to work with.