F.O'C: Shoot 1 & 2 Reflection

On the first day I was responsible for a few of the shots such as the time-lapse however Hamish did the majority of the filming and direction that day.

Some parts of the shoot may have been slightly too brief. Looking back on it I feel as though we could have taken a few more shots in scenes from a few more angles. However in some scenes we did do this and got multiple takes from different angles of the same action. An example of this was when Anna walked along a log in the woods. We took it from a longshot, a close up, an extreme close up and did both a track and a still.

As a team we worked great. We all listened to each other's inputs and took them into account.

Although the actor may not have wanted to be there I think as a group we made the day a bearable experience for her.

Seeing as none of us are experienced artists, our story board doesn't take into account the framing we would envision for our production. This made the process of filming more risky and harder to predict the end result. More time spent drawing key frames may have been a better idea.

I helped Anna with her motivation and coordinated the shots we needed to include.

It turned out one of the props in the time lapse (Anna's chair) needed to be taken out of frame for a set of the shots so we have to take that set of shots again.

Me and Mia jointly directed and shot the footage on this day, trying to maintain a 50:50 ratio with both the filming and directing.

One of the main problems we encountered on this day was the Kites. Due to the extremely high winds on the top of the cliff the kites constantly came apart. On the occasions when they did come apart, small pieces of the kites went missing or (in one incident) flew off the cliff. Luckily we had 3 replicas on hand so we were able to mix and match the pieces to always have one complete kite. However as our only ribbon end flew off the cliff, some of our shots don't feature it and some do. Thankfully this error is very minor but the whole process did slow us down significantly.

The wind and the sun's position on the beach meant that we could only film from one direction. This spawned an issue as the cliffs were in the opposite direction. This meant the lip syncing footage had to feature the beach and no cliff as the background. The fact that Anna's hair blew across her face contributed as well.

I did the 360 pans on top of the cliff, which was challenging for Mia and Luke who had to stay behind me and the camera for the entirety of the shot.

Another set of shots I did were the tracking lip syncing shots on the beach. Walking backwards with the camera on a pebbly beach while keeping the camera steady and Anna's head in frame is quite the challenge. To help ease the process I told Anna to walk slower if I was having trouble keeping the camera steady. Mia walked beside me with a speaker playing the Lucy Rose track loudly with my speaker (which we later lost) which was helpful as Anna could really get immersed within the lyrics.

Because the clocks went back a week or so before, we were having real difficulty with the light towards the end. At some points we had to wait until a cloud had passed before we continued filming as the camera was turning slightly grainy.

At around 3, the SD card ran out of memory. We were only about 3 or so shots from finishing so me and Mia had to go through the footage and delete it as quickly as possible. Time was of the essence here as the sky was quickly growing darker, meaning it would be harder to film not to mention the possibility of rain.