Production

Day one of shooting

Today we filmed scene 1 of our film. I've split it into three parts; Game style selection shots, having a shower and playing on the Xbox.

Unfortunately it was just me and Moritz so I handled the director and runner roles and Moritz was the camera and sound man.

The day didn't get off to a good start but we didn't want to lose time so we continued with our planned filming sequences. I tried to think about continuity because we were in a bedroom, with many objects that could be moved without us thinking about it so I tried to keep tabs on everything. Me and Moritz would talk frequently about different shots and how we were going to shot them. I mentioned a few times about headroom, which worked at some points but he really likes his headroom and the shots didn't look to bad at all and we can use the extra space.

Game Style Selection

This was difficult because the actor couldn't move to much and we didn't want anything distracting in the background. We went for a traditional middle shot whilst following the rule of thirds by placing the actor on the 'invisible' right vertical line. This gives us room to put in the game style overlays later on, which will show the 'Day in the life of a student' as being selected. Unfortunately we had a lot of head room in some of these shots but we will use them to our advantage by using the space for different overlays.

Having a Shower

This sequence was rather fun to film as we had to film him leave the room and walk up the stairs. We used a variety of long, mid, low angle and close-up shots so we could get some cutaways to make it look interesting and continuous. We also got some high angle shots from the top of the stairs that worked well, although we did contemplate that it was rather risky to hold the camera over the banister of the stairs, we did however take precautions. We took a close-up of the door when the actor walks in and out, we made sure to include the shower sounds and actually put the shower on to create steam when the actor walked out.

Playing the Xbox

The actor had fun doing this sequence as he was required to play Halo 4 for at least 15 minutes whilst we shot him and when were getting ready. We had some interesting debates about filming on the bed as it made the camera very unstable and therefore wasn't producing decent shots. In the end we did majority of this sequence using the tripod. We attempted some over-the-shoulder shots, some close-ups of his hands tapping impatiently, playing the controller, some mid shots and a few shots of the screen as he plays, which turned out really well. The last shots were really effective. We wanted them to look fast to show the actor is rushing so we had him throw the clock down, grab his back and run through the door, using a mixture of long, mid and close-up shots to give a nice fast-paced affect. Then the very last shot is a long shot of him rushing through the kitchen door, which we took from the right and back angles to ensure we had enough footage.


Overall we had a good days filming and even though there were some head room issues we can use them to our advantage and add more game like features in the areas like a map or point system.
It took us around 3 hours, we were so happy to have shot the 1st scene and called it a day.
We came across a few problems but I think we dealt with them well.