Re-Shooting and New Location!

We wanted to make the blog as interactive as possible for our viewer to find out how we made Black Out and what we got up to during the filming process behind the scenes. As you saw in the last post, there was a short video that we quickly put together on Final Cut Express in our spare time of all of our out takes, here is another video that we made to show you the change of location for the toilet scenes of our film. Sam  done a quick POV shot of the area in the station with some other footage along the way..

Hope you enjoy it!

Re-Shooting

After going over our first draft of Black Out as a group and suggesting the idea of re-shooting the second half of the film with our teacher, we thought it would be best to get it done as soon as possible whilst the cameras and tripods were available for us. With this in mind, we emailed South West Trains on Tuesday asking them for permission to film at the station today (Thursday 31st March) which they said was absolutely fine! As a group we all went down the station and managed to film all of the shots we wanted, including our newly added mobile phone shot and a new ending to make it a bit more interesting as you'll see in the second draft which will be posted tomorrow!

Here is a short out takes video of what we got up to today, and our location..

1st Draft Of Black Out

This is our first rough cut of Black Out. We still need to sort out the sound and add music to the second half as its a bit bland at the moment. After speaking to Mr Titheridge about our first draft, we've decided to re-shoot the second half of it at the station again, using the South West Trains toilets instead of the school ones, as the light in there is much better and we will be able to achieve the camera angles and continuity of the whole piece much better. The story was also suggested to be changed by our teacher as well, as there seemed to be too many unanswered questions at the end of the 2 minutes...

The storyboards are coming out, and we're re-thinking the shots we are going to include.

Editing, editing, and more editing!

All of the clips are now slowly coming together and the final outcome is looking good. We managed to get the time lapse how we wanted it producing a great effect to the opening of the film. George and Ramtin are currently in the process of making an on screen tutorial of how they managed to do the time lapse so we can upload it to the blog to show you! Editing is such a long process, but day by day we can see the 2 minutes slowly forming together, making it quite exciting to see what the end product is going to be like. We're slightly worried about the toilet scene we filmed, as we used the school toilets with a different colour door breaking the continuity of the whole second half, however we'll have to see whats said in the marking of our first draft.

Editing Black Out

As Ramtin and George are both very experienced when it comes to editing due to them producing videos on Youtube in they're spare time outside of school we decided it would be best to let them lead us through the editing process. As a group we thought it would be better to use Sony Vegas on George's laptop instead of Final Cut Express on the school Mac systems. It would save us time having to get to know the software and we have all the plug-ins we need on Vegas to make sure we get the best opening possible for our target audience. All of the clips were transferred off the camera on to George's laptop allowing other groups to take the camera and tripod whilst we started editing. The time lapse we're finding quite difficult to do, as we want to make sure it looks as good as possible, however once complete we will upload a short tutorial on how we did it! :)

Slowly but surely we're working our way to the final outcome!

Editing Software..

We have now reached the point in the production process where we need to start editing all of the footage we have  gathered over the past couple of days into our first draft, which we aim to submit as soon as possible so we can gain some feedback and class comments into what we can improve.

Sam and myself aren't very experienced at editing, as we are new to the Media subject this year. However George and Ramtin seem to know what they are doing when it comes to putting footage together on a computer system. At school we are advised to use Final Cut Express which is installed on the schools MacBook Pro laptops. Although this would be convenient for us as we'd have access to the work all the time at school, we thought we'd go with what Ramtin and George think is best, and therefore use George's own personal laptop to edit our opening.

George and Ramtin are experienced with editing programs such as Sony Vegas and Adobe After Effects (AE), this meant that they could work together along with the basic ideas from Sam and myself to experiment with different effects so that the first draft we produce is of a high standard.

We are going to start editing the 1st draft on George's laptop in the next media lesson we have together in school!

We want to create a timelapse effect using AE which we can then simply edit together using Sony Vegas.

Filming at WBS Toilets

Today we managed to get together in our free periods to shoot the toilet scene of our opening to 'Black Out'. The location seemed to be ok to use other than the bright light which was giving us a lens flare through the camera which was difficult to resolve so we had to go with it. The camera shots and variety of angles we managed to shoot today worked really well with the effect we're going for, as we managed to include a CCTV shot of Sam walking into the toilet, and a shot of him as if he was looking into a mirror, which looked effective. As we were working in a relatively small space, we couldn't all be in the toilet at once, therefore George stayed outside keeping an eye out for any students which may pop in and interrupt a shot.

Overall the filming went really well!

Filming At Riverside!

After successfully gaining permission to film at the station, we were able to commence filming on the set date of the 28th February 2011. We needed a small set of equipment on the day, such as a tripod to keep the camera steady when filming stable shots, and one small hand held HD camera. Sam, Ramtin, George and myself went to Windsor & Eton Riverside after school on Monday to film all of the clips we needed whilst referring back to our recent storyboarding. When we started to film each scene, we found that maybe some of the shots we drew up on the storyboard didn't look as good as we planned, therefore we chose some more interesting angles to demonstrate our skills with the camera! Overall the filming went really well.. We managed to film all of the shots we needed in one evening, and the location worked perfectly for the setting we were aiming at our target audience for 'Black Out'.

Sam also managed to earn some money busking which was quite interesting...