AICE Media Studies Blog

          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 week...

          Just to continue the explanation of our production phase so far, we are in between our first and second day of shooting, and its coming along pretty well all things considered. After that first disaster of a session, I've learned a lot and tweaked my plotline, story, and characters to tell a more coherent story but also to better adapt to the location we're working with.                   The few shots we did have time to take weren't that good, and gave me some inspiration to come up with some new angles and perspectives that display the action more fluently and overall just better looking. For example, one of the shots was a long take medium long shot, which really didn't look that great looking back at the footage, so it caused me to come up with shots at tighter, more innovative angles and at a closer distance. I think this is a pretty good example of a failure of our project causing us to vastly im...

          After a lot of waiting and planning, we finally started filming and it..... didn't go so well. We had a lot of problems even getting the date set up, with the school year getting so busy at this point that it was really hard to pick a day where we were both available. When we finally nailed down a date and time, we got to the theater, did a little bit of walking and planning where the shots would be taken from and in what order, and then we pulled out the camera and started filming. Or at least we tried.           We were there Saturday night, and right when we were about to shoot everything, it started being swarmed with people, and we couldn't get any shots that didn't include an unwanted extra in the background. This really set us back, and by the time we got a little bit of room to shoot, something else went wrong, like a low battery phone, or a prop issue, or the fact that it was getting too dark to get quality footage...

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          It's getting closer to the shooting date, and I only now just started thinking of what kind of technology I would need to actually shoot on. Most people I've talked to are just using their phones for it, and that seems like a pretty solid option, but I was also considering using some other means to film the scenes.           Since phone cameras are so high quality now, people can film at the quality of some specialized video cameras. This seems like the easiest option since everyone always has their phones glued to their sides at all times, so its always readily available and overall really easy to just start shooting. It's also way easier to upload the footage from a phone to a program on a computer than if you were to upload it from a video camera. This just saves a lot of time and unnecessary work for us and that's really valuable when it gets to the point of editing and submitting the project. Also, phones are way more...

          I've done some more brainstorming about the plot and specific details of the story and actually come up with some real progress. Noah and I even stated storyboarding some shots to really help visualize the individual shots and help ease up some work on shooting day.           These storyboards are very rough sketches of what we are planning the shot to be, and when I say rough, I mean REALLY rough, like stick figures and squares for buildings. We are definitely no artists but these sketches actually helped a lot in bringing along the creative process and will save us a lot of time in the future. I say "creative process" because we weren't completely done with visualizing the individual scenes, because we only had a general idea for what the entire film was going to be like. But when we started drawing the story boards, the specific details started to piece together really nicely and now we pretty much have a pretty detaile...

          Wow so I'm shooting this week and honestly I don't know how I'm going to fit it in with my schedule but if I want to stay anywhere remotely on pace I'm gonna have to figure it out. Noah and I were talking about it and came up with a general idea for how we are planning on scheduling it but at this point in the year, its difficult to get even two or three people together after school so its going to be a little tricky to coordinate a shooting session, let alone an entire sequence of shots in various locations.           Our general plan right now is to shoot the urban scenes sometime this week, by going to the nearby movie theater (I outlined in an earlier post why this would be one of the best locations to shoot) with our friend and new cameraman. This would take place right after sunset when it starts to get dark, so we will have ideal lighting for the night scenes. One is...