Over the last two weeks, four of us have created a 2min short film under the title 'The Package.' The objective was to get the package from one place to another and safely transfer it, then at the end of the film we would find out what was in the box.
We went about this by firstly brainstorming ideas and creating a storyboard. Because we were only filming in school choosing locations was relatively easy. We were also given little scope interms of story, the idea of the project was to get us working together, using the cameras and the editing software (FinalCut Pro X) to improve our knowledge and understanding of the technical elements of a film, the narrative was largely unimportant.
Brainstorming and Storyboarding:
We started off by sitting together, discussing the journey the package would take around school and most importantly, where it would start and end. Once we had established this, we wrote a brief plot and then gave out sections of the film for each person to storyboard over the weekend. The importance of knowing what you're going to film is immense so that you can set up the camera correctly and don't have to plan too much when you're on location.
A storyboard gives a shot by shot cartoon strip of the film, arrows are used to show camera movement and a notations are used to give specifics.
We also ensured we added in the key ingredients, such as match on action shots, low/high angle and also various types of lighting and sound.
Equipment:
We used new HD1080p cameras and tripods to shoot, they are simple DV cameras that record onto an SD card so they were very basic to use and quite self explanatory. We also used a three wheeled dolly for a 360* shot, around a character, this was much harder than we had expected because even the smalled bump can affect the image, therefore we did several takes of this shot.
Filming:
Once we'd written our storyboards and collaborated them to make a shot-shot view of the film we had a brief introduction to the equipment we were sent on location to have a trial and start filming.
We worked in chronological order, keeping strictly to our storyboard. However this became a problem because unanticipated errors occurred, like the weather changing suddenly and the light being different between shots, meaning that any outside shots would have to be re-done another time. So we skipped ahead to the inside shots, managing our time so that we still could back outside to finish the previous shots.
Several shots we had set out on the storyboard eventually became to hard to film so we had to divert from the storyboard a few times a film some fillers to cover for any unseen mistakes we might have made.
There were also certain locations we couldn't use all the time, such as the cookery classrooms and therefore had to book in times that we could go and film at.
Apart from this the filming went relatively smoothly and we had some good footage by the end of the week.
Editing:
We started by watching a few basic tutorials on how to use the program FinalCut Pro X, the free tutorials can be found on www.izzyvideo.com and are very useful in teaching the basics of editing.
After getting a brief overlook, we uploaded our footage and began by sorting the videos into different categories, indoor and outdoor, aswell as deleting the sections we were sure we didn't want.
It didn't take long to slot the shots next to each other, creating a rough cut which we could then fine tune to create a more slick film.
After spending about two hours solid editing, we just about finished, adding titles and credits to give it a glossy overview.
During the editing process it was key to keep watching the film through to check for continuity and that it made sense, we also got random people who knew nothing about it to see if they understood what was going on.
I'm pleased with the product itself and this film was an excellent way of getting to grips with the software and equipment we'll be using to create our two minute thriller openings.
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