Our first use of the camera equipment and experience of filming was 'The Package'. Being given a short film task with a broad prompt (simply the title 'The Package') was a good first experience with the equipment and softwares, as it gave us free reign to explore a range of different techniques and styles of filming. The final product was a significant influence on the style of our film, especially the more modern, dynamic pieces of camerawork, such as the handheld shots following the first victim/antagonist, shown below:
The shots are extremely similar in setup, but the slight shakiness and the colour and lighting lend a darker tone to the version from 'ShadowMan'. Another example of shots we reused from 'The Package' to 'ShadowMan' is the over-the-shoulder shots shown to the right.
Producing the final cut of 'The Package' gave us opportunity to use the Final Cut Pro editing software, and work out our own styles of editing. The film uses a range of camerawork, both dynamic and less so, and required a lot of editing to provide the fast pace we wanted, making it a perfect trial. Obviously, it being our first outing into the world of filming and editing, there are imperfections in 'The Package', it seems to be predominated by shots of Max's character walking around, which somewhat damages the exciting pace we strived for, and the music does not fit perfectly with the imagery, as we did not spend a huge amount of time searching through music websites to find the perfect piece.
Our actual Preliminary Task was naturally far easier than 'The Package', due to it's shorter length and less stringent requirements, as well as the addition of a fourth student to our class. 'The Package' and the camera practice it had given us proved invaluable and allowed all four of us to get the task completed in relatively little time. We used shots from 'The Package', such as the door handle match-on-action and the over the shoulder shots, as we found that they were relatively easy to do whilst still being effective.
When it came to the filming of 'ShadowMan', we had to organise our actors and get everyone to out-of-school locations for the first time. For both our previous tasks the cast had been comprised of other Media Studies students, and all of our filming locations had taken place within school premises. This new level of required organisation proved initially to be a problem, as we were unused to filming in public and relying on the attendance of external actors. We were also unprepared for the volume of shots we would require, due to the significantly shorter length, and lesser complexity, of the two prior tasks. These, however, were fairly insignificant issues, as although they were initially irritating, we very quickly adapted to our new circumstances, and thus in filming days 3 and 4 we were able to be efficient and effective in our filming of the scenes.
Overall, in the progression from our first tasks to the final product of 'ShadowMan', the key things we have learnt have been organisation, planning, and equipment use in greater detail. The two tasks gave us a good idea and an excellent starting point in terms of using camera equipment, sound apparatus, and editing software, however the use of lighting and Motion software, as well as organisation with external locations and actors, was more or less completely new to us, and in addition to this the actual filming and editing of 'ShadowMan' gave us a far greater insight into our use of what we already new.
CM
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