First taste of filming

My group and I have recently had a taste of what it's going to be like when we actually starting filming our horror trailer. This was done by us using the equipment provided by the media department (e.g. video cameras and tripods) to go out and film some of the scenes used in our story boards (as well as experiment with other shots) just so that we could get a rough understanding of what the trailer could look like and the process of creating it. At first we were rather excited about this since we could get to grips with the technology and how to use it correctly so that we can capture the best shots possible. 

It turns out the filming was more difficult than we anticipated since even though we took a lot of shots and they weren't hard to film the actually end result didn't turn out nearly as good as we thought it would. There are many reasons for this but because of these reasons we now know what we have to avoid so that the trailer is of high quality. The first problem we had was lighting, since we were filming in the morning the lighting was far to bright and didn't give off a scary atmosphere, also when we used electronic lighting there were several instances where the reflections of the ones filming we seen in the windows and it look awful, granted we had a limited time to film the shots so we could shot at night but this was still a valid mistake and our teacher said that "you can use this bright lighting to your advantage since it can create very strong shadows". 

Another mistake we encounter is that a lot the shots consist of to many pans and shots that lasted far too long. The main problem with this is that in most films, pans are useful for establishing the scene/setting, however in a trailer this is not advisable since the shots only last about 2 seconds and there isn't much point of using pans since pans often last a rather long time and when we watched this we could see that it would make the trailer seem incredibly slow, plus often the pans were quite blurry since the camera was constantly moving and couldn't fully focus. To redeem this, our teacher advised us to use more still since we could cut away from different shots much easier and it is easier to focus on a single point which would get rid of blur problems we had with the panning.

The last problem we had with filming was the mise-en-scene. Now this was mainly to do with the fact that were had a limit time to film and couldn't use our desired locations but it still as issue I must address. The mise-en-scene in some scene didn't fit with what we were trying to establish since when taking the shot of the church a car was in the way which was rather distracting and looked out of place and also the shot where we were practicing the blood scene with the sink didn't fit together at all since the sink looked way to modern (since we used the facilities in this school for that since instead of inside of a church) and didn't look the least bit scary, also in that scene we stupidly left the fake blood tube on the side and it was caught in the camera (misplaced prop).

We also had a problem with playing back the record shots from our camera since the camera was automatically set to play back using AVC HD video program. In order to make it possible for use to view our videos on any computer we had to use Transcoding (basically means video conversion) to change the AVC HD settings to Microsoft AVI PAL in order for it took work. To do this we simply had to use Adobe media encoder to Transcode all of our shots in the require format so that it could play back on any computer. In then end even though we ran into a lot of errors and the shots didn't turn out how we wanted them to, we still got a good feel for and understanding of how to use the camera and take the appropriate shots thanks to the feed back we got from the teachers and observing what went wrong in our shots.