First Location Shoot

On this day we made a short film at Vinters Park which is a nature reserve not far from our university. This was our first time filming on a location that wasn't at our university so we weren't sure what challenges we were going to face. Once we arrived we decided to follow the path round the corner and found a small open space which would work perfectly for filming. 

We had a brief assignment of a 'meeting' and film something that was around a minute long. Callum and I decided to film a mock-western, set up the tripod to use but decided that it would be best to film handheld as we needed to get some shot fairly close to the ground as you can see in the photo to the left. We had a few issues with lighting in certain shots, this was because we weren't able to white balance as we didn't have a piece of paper with us. We also had to be aware of the public around us and make sure that we weren't in anyone's way as it's a public area. 

We were very happy with the final outcome of the film as it turned out exactly how we'd imagined. In the film however we had to be aware that in order to get the shot we want, we had to break the 180 degree rule. We were nervous about this as we learnt in a lecture that a lot of the time it doesn't look right and can throw the audience off. Luckily for us, it worked very well and almost worked better because we wanted to oppose everything in the shoot. For example, we used on the actors left hand in one shot and we didn't want to use the other actors opposing hand, we wanted it to be the same hand. 

We were very happy with the final outcome of the short film and we were also very glad that nothing went drastically wrong. At this point in our course we hadn't started using boom poles, we only had the small mic that you could attach to the camera, so the dialogue at the end if very muffled, but we weren't going to get caught up about it. The shoot went very well and when it came to editing it was very easy to put all the images together as we made sure the clips were short enough to keep up with the typical western music. All in all, our first location shoot went very well.