Success!



          Well, the second attempt at filming was very productive and successful. After learning a lot from our first experience, Noah and I went out and shot all of our needed scenes and we are now done with the production stage of filming. It feels great to finally get that hurdle out of the way and start focusing on the home stretch of the project. Overall, it was productive and successful, but also another learning experience.


          Before we got to the location to shoot, I had most of the shots planned out, and the order that they would go in for the final product. This gave us a lot more direction than we had the first time and saved us a lot of time. However, the actual filming process opened the door to changes and tweaks that we made on the spot, and ended up making it a more coherent and better story than I had originally planned. We fixed a lot of other mistakes from last time as well. For example, we filmed on a weekend last time so the theater was really crowded and limited us a lot. So this time, we went early in the week when the theater was pretty much empty so that really gave us a lot more freedom and mobility and saved us some time. Speaking of time, I originally thought we were going to be there for an hour at the most, but we ended up staying for three hours. It seems like a long time but we were actually really focused on it so it went by pretty fast.


          It definitely took a few attempts to get it right, but it's a good thing that we got it right this time around because we now need to focus on editing and sound before the deadline. Finding out how to smoothly run the filming process definitely gave us some needed confidence on the project because at the time we were behind schedule, having a hard time getting everything organized, and overall lacking confidence in our project. However, now that we have the production phase completely done, I'm really liking the direction this is headed in.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Money and Primer

Image
     Our film is going to be extremely low budget, and is somewhat misplaced among the big blockbusters that take millions to compile a futuristic setting, hire a star cast, and more large aspects that would be impossible with our budget, which is close to $0.      I found some interesting advice for low budget movies while researching, though, and I think some aspects would be beneficial to my film. One interesting tip is that "Some 'niche' audiences are large enough to make for a very profitable market, if you can reach them". This is something I will take into consideration when planning, because niche audiences can in some cases make the movie a profit, even if it is very low budget. However I'm probably going to focus on the second piece of advice: "If you're aiming for a more general audience, quality matters. A lot. " I feel like this is how a lot of low budget Sci-Fi films become successful, and a shining example of this is Primer. ...
Read more

First Impressions

Image
         I'm finding in my research that the truly great science fiction movies almost always have captivating and creative openings sequences, because that seems to be one of the most important things for a movie: a solid first impression. Captivating the audience and giving them a positive first opinion right when the film starts is huge, and this is clearly evident in what is considered to be one of the best opening sequences of all time, the scene from the original Star Wars.       Every second of this 7 minute scene is amazing. It starts out with the famous yellow text crawl to set the exposition, with the awesome theme music playing in the background. It then shows a giant star destroyer chasing a tiny cruiser, firing the laser cannons directly at it, with special effects that were years ahead of its time. Then, in the interior of the ship, the scene builds a lot of tension and suspense as the rebel soldiers await the imperial in...
Read more

For the Fame

Image
     At this point in the project I am considering the production and distribution aspects of my film. Even though this is a student made film and I'm not actually paying anyone for this or producing or distributing it, it's still interesting to see what strategies I would utilize in doing so for real.      As for the production aspect, I was researching different companies that produce low budget sci fi films, but sci fi is a genre where it is very hard for a low budget film to succeed, and it was hard to find any companies that actually specifically produce films for a low budget in that genre. However, I would use a small independent production company in order to minimize costs and match the small scale of my film. Working with an independent company would also give me a lot more creative freedom and I wouldn't be limited as much as if I worked with a large corporate controlling company. An interesting one I found was Vibrant Media Product...
Read more