Digital Video Production.

One minuet video evaluation. 

For my latest brief were asked to work in groups of 3 in making a 1 minuet video.

I came up with an idea for a short thriller, as the brief entailed that the audience needed to be captivated for the whole duration of the production. 

 We all felt we had our own strengths and weaknesses when it came to role allocation but in the end we decided as a group to share the roles so as to get a feel for every part of the job. I guess my main role was coming up with the initial idea, which was adapted by the rest of my group. For this I drew up some storyboards, I had to think carefully about what we wanted in the production. I choose the idea because there were lots of chances to use skills that all three of us could use separately. I put a lot of emphasis on the idea of sound for my production so we could make an effort using the sound recording equipment. We decided to use the directional mic for picking up the sound we needed, as we wanted intense sound (such as pencil scratching and breathing). This was some times tricky as we needed the mic in close up to the action but couldn’t have it in the shot. We solved these problems mostly by changing camera angles. On shoot I moved mostly between direction and sound engineer, although I did enjoy setting up some up the shot. Angling the shots in interesting ways, keeping a sense of mystery in the character by only seeing part of his face for a lot of the film. I spent a lot of the time making sure we had crisp sound coming through the audio converter. one serious problem I came across was that the battery on the audio splitter ran out ,this was a simply problem to fix but could have been seriously critical if we were on shoot away form any shops. One of the hardest things I had to keep track of was the lighting. As we were shooting in-side, we wanted unnatural orange tinted lighting to go with the look of the room in the film. This was a problem as we the only light we had which was able to move was a big lamp light. The trouble was we couldn’t move the light as it would cause continuous errors when put together as there would be light and shadow on the wrong side of the actors face. I found the location in my friends flat, I choose this location as it looked very desolate and clinical, white brick walls and untidy, meaning there was not a lot of set design needed.

 Editing,  As I was unable to be available for editing I put a lot of effort in to post production work and filming, with the camera and I was involved with sound.

 

Mike Eastwood