Friday 20th December 2013

Final Shoot

So today I began my final shoot. I had planned ahead on what locations I want to use, however, I had to change some locations as some were more convenient than others. For example I had planned to use a corridor as my starting point for the animation, but I decided to use a small room instead as it wasn't really possible to stop others from walking down the corridor. The small room provided me with a secluded area where there was no interference. This also meant that my idea slightly diverted from the original plan as I wanted the establishing shot to be of a corridor with various rooms to go through.

Using the new location had it's flaws as well. First and foremost there was not a lot of space to work with, so the camera angles became limited. I could have possibly taken the camera off of the tripod but I assumed the camera would have shaken without any support. I wanted to keep camera shake to a minimum so I did not want to explore this option. With the space limitation I believe I managed to get a few decent camera angles to work with. One camera angle was a P.O.V (point of view) shot of the character looking at a message on their phone. This shot was used as a narrative for the audience to understand exactly what is happening. If I hadn't shown this message it would have been hard to portray the storyline. I used this shot various times throughout my shoot as it was the best way for me to convey what is happening at each point in the story.

This is one of the camera angles I used. With the limited amount of space this was quite awkward to accomplish.

I again used the P.O.V shot in my next scene which I shot in a film studio. This scene was originally planned to happen in a classroom but I again decided against this for two reasons. The first being I needed an empty classroom, and the classroom I originally wanted too use had students working inside even though I had been told it would be empty. The second reason was that the film studio was a much larger area. This meant I could have a lot more space for the camera and tripod. The large area is also why I planned for my next scene to be shot outside.

It doesn't show the entire area however this conveys a little bit of how open the room is.

With a large open area with no one around was an ideal spot to shoot my next scene but I had to be very conscience of the weather as I did not want inconsistent lighting. This didn't turn out to be much of a problem in the end as the weather was fairly consistent throughout. At one point I did encounter a slight problem with equipment which delayed my shoot for some time. The outdoor scene is the first scene I shot today and I didn't inspect equipment suffieciently. The tripod didn't have a plate to attach the camera to the tripod so I needed to find one. Also the camera didn't have a lot of battery remaining and I was unaware that it used a rechargeable battery pack as a posed to using standard double A batteries. It wasn't until I had obtained some batteries that I realised there was a spare battery pack and it was fully charged. So in all I had wasted about an hour or so trying to get a plate and batteries and eventually got to shooting. A slight problem I also encountered was that the ground was slightly uneven so I needed to adjust the tripod to avoid having slanted scenes. It wouldn't be that much of a problem as I could easily fix it in Photoshop or Premiere.

 

This image shows the outside area I used, also the sky was very clear which was why I was able to get my lighting fairly consistent.

Throughout my shoot I used the landscape setting on the camera instead of adjusting the ISO, F-stop and aperture. The camera setting worked reasonably well inside and outside so I felt that leaving the setting the same would be more beneficial than constantly using a different setting to match the location I am at. I also used two lenses for the camera for different shots. The macro lens was used for the majority of close-up shots where as I used an 18-55mm for wide-shots and for all shots in the small room. This is because the macro lens was far too zoomed in to use in such a small room, thus the 18-55mm was the better option as it showed a lot more but was still close enough.