Week one - The first shoot

We were given the titles The Chase, Pickpocket and Late Again to inspire us in making our first two-minute film, located within the Parry Williams Building and with no dialogue. As we had been assigned to our alphabetically organised groups over the Christmas break, we had never met, so got in touch via email and created a facebook group.

We came up with the idea of combining The Chase and The Pickpocket, and vaguely discussed online how this would work and the props we would need. When we met for the first time on the Monday morning of filming, however,  we were pretty much unprepared for the shoot, and since we were the first group to go out filming we had to hit the ground running.  Before we’d hardly introduced ourselves to each other we were collecting equipment, assigning acting roles, planning the shoot and filming it.

As we worked we got to know each other, and  all contributed ideas and suggestions, working pretty well together.  Perhaps we were just being polite as we’d never met before, or maybe we’re just going to be a dynamic team…

L to r Chloe, Ben and Dan discussing the fairly dismal choice of locations on offer to us in the Parry Williams building. We knew it was practically impossible to make it look like anything other than a school-type corridor.

Movie Synopsis

Guy enters building and looks for likely person to steal from. He spots chap hanging around in corridor, asks him for the time. After he has walked on chap realises he has had his watch stolen and gives chase. Meanwhile the thief spots another victim and while approaching him sees the chap whose watch he has stolen looking for him and spins around, avoiding detection by disguising himself with his hood. After he has walked away his second victim realises he too is missing his watch. Outside, the thief is asked the time and he is thrilled to roll up his sleeve and show not one, but four watches, and walks off smugly.

Tom landed the role of the guy who gets his watch stolen. He managed to add humour to his character by creating an individual absurd way of running down the stairs.

Filming in the corridor – it was tight, and the group decided not to use the tripod for these scenes. This was the first of two scenes involved Ben walking backwards with the camera as Dan walked towards him .

One of the decisions we made on the day – to film Tom running out of the door looking for the thief, then tilting up to get a shot of Dan walking across the bridge. It took a number of attempts to get the timing right.

Another decision made on the day when we realised that we had a selection of watches as props was to for Dan to wear all of them and roll up his sleeve to reveal them - it turned out to be the punchline of the film!

 

Editing

Four of us squeezed into the editing suite to contribute to the editing process. We made a rough cut of the film and found some suitable royalty-free music.  We tried to add an effect to make it look more like an authentic silent movie but found that there is not one in the basic version of Avid, so choose to speed the frame rate up a little, make it black and white and add a slightly grainy effect.  To help the narrative along we added some captions. These we created in photoshop and imported them in to the movie since there was no template in Avid we liked.  

All in all we are pretty pleased with our first film and are looking forward to the next challenge – after all, if this is what we can produce with no script, storyboard or shot list with a bunch of people we’ve never met before – just think what we can do with a bit of pre-planning!

 'Watch Yourself' features almost everyone in Group C and was very much a collaborative learning on the hoof experience from which we can hopefully grow and improve as film makers.

Reflections on week one

Chloe Hudson
- It was always going to be a challenge having not met each other before, however, I think even in this first week we have managed to demonstrate teamwork and the creative collaboration skills paramount to the filmmaking process. This module will hopefully equip us all with competence to produce films quickly and efficiently, whilst still keeping our creative goals in mind. 


Thomas Howitt
- I was pleased with our first film as a group. Considering how difficult it was always going to be working with complete strangers for the first time I feel as though the film turned out near enough as well as we would have liked. Some things were a little shaky, but none of us seemed to expect too much from week one. The group worked well together and immediately idea's came together that really showed what each of us could add to the film-making process. I hope that we can continue to improve as a group throughout our time on this module.


Liz Hutchinson
- It was a little scary to make a film with a group of people I'd never met before, but I think the fact that the whole thing needed to be shot so fast helped us to get acquainted quickly.  We have started to learn about each others strengths, and are now aware of how important careful planning of our next films will be, and that assigning roles will improve the efficiency of film production.  I was pleased with the results of 'Watch Yourself' as it showed that we could work well together and look forward to the next challenge.