Post 16 - Production Report

Production Report

On our first day of filming, we did encounter a tiny problem straight away; one member of our group was stuck at another school, and so we worked as a team to resolve this by agreeing that whilst I drove to go and collect her, the other two would begin setting up equipment so that we didn’t waste any time.

We decided to film Scene 2 before Scene 1 because we needed to use some outdoor natural lighting, and since we were filming after school we didn’t want it to get dark before we had finished. We did have to re-film the first two shots, as whilst we were filming the last two shots, we realised that the door was shut in the first two shots, but open in the last two. Therefore, to avoid any continuity errors, we corrected this immediately.

On our second day of filming, we scheduled to film Scene 9 and Scene 6. We encountered some difficulties when filming Scene 9 as it requires me to drive round and stop perfectly central in the framing to allow James to get into the car. This became a problem as with filming after school teachers were waiting to leave in their cars, and so we were delayed and completing the filming took longer than expected. However, we worked as a team and tried to counter-act this issue by selecting two of us to go and get a new charged battery, and the other two to go and make sure that the location for Scene 6 didn’t have any issues.

However, we did actually have to re-film all of this as Scene 9 was accidentally filmed in the incorrect format, and Scene 6 had too much background noise of inconsiderate people shouting silly things/ being deliberately noisy, as well as wind noise.

I'm not in this photograph as I took the picture.

On our third day of filming we re-filmed Scene 6 on a VERY sunny day, and much earlier in the day (10.30am) than what the scene is set (6.00pm.) Therefore, in order to make the footage appear less bright we used the white side of the reflector to shade the actors and the bench surrounding them in the shots.

Day four of filming consisted of another after school shoot, and we filmed Scenes 8 and 10. For this we needed a third actor to play the role of Ashley. Luckily, we encountered little problems whilst filming the two scenes as we had previously arranged with the P.E department so that we didn’t have any interruptions. The only minor issue which we encountered was reflection issues in the window of the boy’s changing room door, but this was resolved quickly as we just needed to move slightly to the right.

Day 5 of filming involved shooting Scenes 4 and 7 (the two football scenes) in school hours (from 2.15pm – 3.25pm.) In order to do this successfully, we needed a lot of extras who were willing to change into the football shirts, and so we worked as a team to split up, and recruit as many boys as possible. However, we needed to make a decision as a group here to revise our script, as we didn’t quite have enough boys to portray a realistic football match, and so we decided to make Scene 4 a training/ practice session instead. We had also previously talked to the P.E department to ensure that the field would be empty, and that there were enough shirts so that we could accurately portray a football practice session. We used many different techniques to film these scenes, including hand-held camera, worm’s eye view and using the tri pod on its lowest setting. Therefore, I feel that we experimented well and developed our camera working skills, as well as our team working skills, in order to capture some successful footage. It was also during this shoot that I captured the images I needed for the production of my postcard.

On our 6^th day of filming, we set out to capture Scene 5. This is one of our largest scenes, and therefore one of the most difficult as it required a lot of dialogue from a lot of characters, as well as a lot of complex character movement, such as Ashley being pushed onto the floor, and John throwing a football into Ashley’s face. We managed to get everything filmed within about 2 hours, as we were luckily not to have much interruption. The only time of which a delay was caused, was when a small girl and her mother arrived at the school near where we were filming. This was an issue due to the content and the explicit language used in our script; therefore, we felt that we shouldn’t really continue swearing in front of the small girl. Luckily, they went inside within about 8-10 minutes, so we were able to carry on.

The 7^th day consisted of re-filming Scenes 1 and 9.  Once we had watched what we filmed the first time, we had learnt from our mistakes and worked as a team to use our skills to amend them. These mistakes  included framing issues, touching the wires on the microphone causing excess ‘bangs’ and background disrupted sound, setting the camera to the correct format, and eliminating the noisy self-cleaning urinals in the boy’s toilets. Therefore, we decided to re-film Scene 1 in the girl’s toilets. I feel that these two scenes were filmed very efficiently and successfully as we had corrected our mistakes, and were aware of what to avoid.

We then made a group decision to remove Scene 3 from our piece. This is mainly because we realised that we don't actually need it for plot development or to establish characters, and it was incredibly problematic to film due to the amount of actors that we needed and the amount of time that we needed to capture all of the different shots, whilst trying to film between rain showers. We also decided to remove Scene 3 as the ending of Scene 2 and the beginning of Scene 4 flow together very well, and our piece is already around 5 minutes long without another long Scnee being added.

On our final day of filming, we re-shot Scene 10 as there were issues with framing again due to the uneven surface, and sun shining on the camera’s display so we didn't realise until we watched the footage back indoors that we had made a mistake. When trying to film this scene, we had a lot of delay due to severe weather conditions, including "the wettest day of the year" as so it just wasn't possible to film for a few days at the risk of damaging the equipment and incurring a lot of continuity errors.