Fortnightly reflection

I had aimed to make a post every fortnight in this project reflecting on how things have been going. This is my second.

There's not much to say really. The 1st - 5th of Feb went well. We spent our time ironing out our idea, making it so that we had thought of everything that could go wrong and finding a solution. We made a story board for the 1st 40 seconds of the video and then made an animatic out of this. At this stage i was feeling positive about the project and it seemed like everything was going to go smoothly.

However the week of the 8th - 12th where we were supposed to be getting all our test footage i got ill and only came into college for one day. We got a tiny bit of test footage from newmarket road with our performer but it wasn't much.

The next week was half term and we had hoped that because we hadn't got any test footage we would be able to shoot some over half term but it never happened because we were too focused on our social life. This meant that the following week where we where meant to get all our real footage we didn't really know what was going to work etc.

The week of filming did not go to plan at all. On monday there was a trip which cut that day as a chance to shoot. Then our performer was not free until yesterday afternoon but still there was a time limit. We did not use our time well either which meant we didn't film very much. Today we are going to shoot everything at 1.30. I feel very motivated to do this and i think it will go well. We cannot shoot at the weekend as me and tilly both have work.

Weather

This is what the weather looks like for todays filming. we will be filming from about 1.30 so this looks alright. The dark clouds and light rain may add effect to our video.

25/02/10 shoot

The filming yesterday did not go as well as we had hoped. We didn't get nearly as much done as we wanted to. This is mainly because the people at newmarket road scrap yard don't make us feel comfortable. It was fine when we were just taking pictures but with hannah dressed in just a dress and tights around the typical scrap yard workers its hard to perform. Instead we went to the back of where i work where there are skips and containers. The footage was good and what we wanted but because we had wasted a lot of time thinking weather or not to film at the scrap yard we didn't have much time left to actually film. This meant we didn't get many takes done.

We plan to film again today (26/02/10) in the afternoon. This will hopefully go a lot better and we will not waste as much time. This is basically our last chance to do any filming as me and tilly both have work over the weekend.

Weather :(

I just looked at the weather on the BBC website to see if its going to be raining when we are planning to film today (1-4) and there is going to be heavy rain from 12-6. This means that we are going to be un able to shoot today as we do not have the equipment to keep the camera dry and it would be un fair to make our performer stand in the rain and cold for that amount of time in judt a dress.

Costumes

animatic

Tilly and Tom's animatic from cmdiploma on Vimeo.

Schedule for 2nd Feb - 19th March

2nd - 5th of Feb - Animatic week

This week we are going to be doing our animatics. This will be at least 30 - 40 seconds long and can be for any part of the song. Its purpose would be to give the band/manager an idea of what the video will look like. We will be trying to think of literally ever shot we could put in there so that it keeps up a pace and looks effective.

8th - 12th of Feb - Test footage week

This will involve making phone calls to get proper permission to film then once we have this we will drive over to all our locations and get as much footage as we can. We will experiment with different angles, static or moving and see how we will manage the suns position as this could very easily be a problem for us. We may then very roughly edit this together with the soundtrack and upload it to the blog.

15th - 19th of Feb

HALF TERM

22nd - 26th of Feb - Filming week

In this week we will be doing all our actual filming. We will take what we learn from our test footage and shoot everything. We will try to shoot more than what we've planned so that we can be sure we have enough footage.

1st - 5th of March - Rough cut week

This week will be focused on creating a rough cut. The deadline for this is friday the 5th. I am looking forward to this part as it is when we see all out work start to come together. Hopefully it will all go well and we won't have any problems with the amount of footage we get etc. We are tying to avoid this. Any time that we have free this week we will be spending on our digipaks as these are due in next week.

8th - 12th of March - Finished video week

Our final video has to be finished by the end of this week so we will be working hard to finish our edit. 11th of March is the deadline for our digipak.

15th - 19th of March - Evaluation week

In this week we will be doing a lot of evaluation tasks and looking back on our project.

Reflection

I am going to try to start doing a reflection post roughly once every 2 weeks. This is my first.

Over the past week I have been enjoying creating our ideas. It was hard to get started but after a while we got there with our idea. We got a very positive response to our pitch and I am very pleased with this.

However are still things that need improving, for example, we still haven't really developed any proper plan/shot list for out project, we've simply got our idea. We did start the timeline but didn't get very far. This may start to be a problem very soon so I will be trying to get the ball rolling with creating a full plan.

When taking pictures of our locations we had planned to think about shots and angles. I don't feel that we did a very good job of this and that we should have spent longer at each location. However we did have a time limit and we only just managed to get back in time so this would have been hard.