Reflections on the Test Shoot

We completed our test shoot on Monday 24th November. Overall i felt it went well and we achieved everything we set out to achieve. It showed us the areas which we needed to improve on in time for our real shoot and showed us the areas which worked really well and that we should definitely use in our real thing. The only aspect of our test shoot which we have still not yet achieved is deciding our final idea! We are still stuck between the two ideas because when it came to shooting them they both contained good and bad aspects and they both had lots of potential. Charlotte preferred the 2nd idea whereas me and Nisha preferred the first but as Charlotte is our actress we would prefer it if she liked what she was acting out. I think we will have to get feedback from as many people as possible and then the most popular idea we will go ahead with. 

The only criticism i had with our test shoot is the amount of times we managed to get distracted. For the time that we were there we found our selves loosing focus fairly often and this made our test shoot take longer than we had anticipated. For our real shoot i think this is the area that we need to work on the most because we are all such good friends therefore it is hard for us to not go off track a bit. I think we will set ourselves the target of working for solid few hours then our reward can be a small break where we are able to let off some steam and gossip otherwise i can see our shoot taking longer than we had hoped. 

Apart from that i feel the test shoot went extremely well and everything ran smoothly and according to plan. I am looking forward to shooting the real thing. 

Group Work

Now that we have begun planning for our test shoot, i feel our group are working well together and all the individual research that we have all done has been a lot of good as it helped us come up with the 2 final ideas that we are going to be testing in our test shoot. We are up to date with everything and we communicate really well as a group so if there is a problem we can overcome it. Hopefully by the end of Monday we will have one final idea to go along with so we can begin working really hard on making it perfect. I am really enjoying the project so far and look forward to the rest of it.

Idea For Group Project

Once we had started planning our group project i went away and decided to come up with some ideas of my own to pitch to the group. I came up with a few but a narrowed it down to one final favourite idea and with this idea i decided to fill in the question sheet to show to my group in our next group meeting. Here it is:

1. You see a girl leave her office and she begins to walk somewhere but we do not know where. The opening sequence will be the camera following the character to the place they are going and as it is in their POV the audience will only find out where they are going once they have arrived. The place they arrive at is a dingy, decrepit building with a young hostage tied up inside.


2. The audience should feel scared, confused, suspicious, curious when they are watching this opening sequence. The main issues raised will be obsession, stalking, murder and revenge but these issues will only become apparent in certain parts of the opening.


3. It is a real time sequence as the audience are seeing it through the characters POV so therefore it is happening whilst the audience are watching it. There is a small piece of dialogue right at the end of the sequence between the hostage and the woman when she enters the run down building. There will be a soundtrack and diagetic sound of the surroundings however the soundtrack will be played louder than the diagetic sound to create an atmosphere. I was thinking of having various cut aways to pictures of other girls or newspaper titles describing previous hostage victims which will make the audience think that the woman will be the next hostage victim when really she is the killer.


4. Woman taking the journey-buisness woman, pencil skirt, white shirt, red hair, unattractive, middle aged, white, obcessive, murderer. Hostage - young girl, blood red lips, black eyeliner, smudged make - up, puffy eyes from where she has been crying, helpless, weak, short skirt, glittery top with blood stains on it, victim


5. The sequence will take place in various locations as the woman is walking through a town and the camera follows her. The main locations that the camera focuses on are the dingy, run down, old building that is like a un used warehouse with very little light. It seems unhygenic and scary. The other location is the womans office which is like a state of the art, modern, glass, high rise building. It makes gives the impression to the audience that she is a professional buisness woman.


6. The mise-en-scene changes as the sequence progresses. It goes from everyday lighting that is bright and sunny to dark eery lighting as she begins to walk down back alley ways and enters the horrible building. The overall visual style will be fairly normal that the audience will be able to relate to. It will feature shops and locations that the audience will be able to recognise and so therefore it will seem realistic but as the scene progresses the locations will become more unrecognisable and unnormal and the audience will then begin to suspect something. The dress codes will be a typical buisness woman's dress code with the pencil skirts and fitted shirts. The young hostage will be dressed like a typical teenager on a night out somewhere making it more relatable to the audience and therefore more chilling. The people that she encounters on the street will be dressed like an average person making the scene plausable. The mise-en-scene is trying to build up tension by moving from normal, average day surroundings to more unusual, frightening, distrubing ones and the audience will notice these changes and therefore become scared and confused.


7. The camera will mainly be in the POV of the person walking therefore the movement of the camera will mimic the movement of the camera using tracking as if she is walking forward and whip-pans and pans to show the movement of her head turning etc. This will therefore mean there will be a range of shot distances and angles. Occassionally there will be cuts where we see the scene as if we are on lookers but these shots will only be brief and they will mainly be MLS and LS to act as establishing shots so that the audience get a sense of the surroundings.


8. It will be a continuous sequence with a few examples of cross cutting between the main action and shots telling the background behind the main action (polaroids and newspaper titles). I will try and show off my knowledge of continuity editing as much as possible with the sequence by using match on action, shot-reverse-shot, eye line matchs and the 180 degree rule.


9. Yes, a few of the questions are maybes but once i have presented my idea to the group we can adapt it to make it more suitable. It is just a starter idea that we can build up and create other elements around it.


10. They liked the idea but they felt it would be too complicated to shoot as the weather is unreliable and due to there being a large amount of people on the streets the continuity would be difficult to get right. They felt that if we had longer to shoot it and our sequence did not have to be 2 minutes then maybe we could of gone ahead with it and worked on it further but due to the lack of experience we decided for a student film it was too complicated and difficult to do.