So i’ve re-edited it and managed to make it 4 minutes long, as it was said in the brief for this project.
Moving Image project of Design Practice 2 was a very interesting but also time consuming task. I as a camera operator in my group and I have enjoyed this very much. In the preproduction phase we had many meetings to plan every part of our movie, get the right location, storyboards, props, costumes and actors. I can say that this stage was completed after week two, however in week three we had a lighting induction which was very helpful to all of us, not just people who were responsible for this on the set. During this stage I was researching different techniques and camera angles that could be used in our film. The biggest problem we had was to find actors for our movie. We managed to convinced few people from our year to help us, so Sabrina agreed to take a role of Karen and Kalab helped us as a police officer. However we still did not have an actor for a main role, Brian. We tried contacting with the NTU Drama Society, but at the end there was no response from them. At the end Edgar decided to take this role so he was both, the director and main actor.
We started filming at the beginning of fourth week and intentionally it was supposed to take us two days to complete it. It turned out to be longer as we needed an extra day to completely finish the film. I think we did very well even with that small delay. We usually met an hour, or 30 minutes before out actors got there, so we could set up the equipment, so we could film straight away after they’ve joined us. To make the film more interesting we shot many scenes from different angles. It took more time but at the end it was worth it and we had a lot of footage to work with during the editing stage. For the first time I’ve used tracks to do a tracking shot. I was not sure if the outcome will be successful while we were doing it on set, as in some places the camera jumped few times, especially in the outside shots. Tracking shots inside were great and it just made my film much more interesting. Getting a right composition on set was a bit difficult, especially when the director was acting and I was not sure if what I’m doing is OK with his vision.
After we finally finished the filming it was a time to edit it into a final version. From the beginning I had in my mind an idea of an intro that would be influenced by an intro to “Dexter”, so I tried to achieve this on my edit. Also it makes my edit more original and different as most of members from my group used outside shots. My intro is a different from what I was inspired from, I’ve use mostly close ups of the sink and dishwashing which sets the mood well in my opinion. My biggest challenge through the entire project was to get this film to be no longer than 4 minutes. My first edit was almost 5 minutes long so there was a lot to cut out. This took me all day but I have to say that I was proud when I finally achieved it. Also this made my film much more interesting to watch. There are still something that I would improve. For example the first half of my film drags, because of one long shot through the scene. I should make it more interesting and put more close up in between it. Also I did not get enough time to do a colour correction. Some of my footage is blue, while the other clips are orange. If I would do this project again this would be on a top of my list.
