Group: Evaluation Of Shoot 18/03/2011

On Friday, 18th March 2011, we went to the woods between Southborough and Speldhurst in Tunbridge Wells, and filmed on a public footpath which runs parallel to Benthan Road.

We met at 7:30, but didn't start shooting until gone 8:00 because we had to walk to our location, so we were fairly quickly behind schedule. We began shooting, but it quickly became apparent how many problems we would have shooting in the dark without professional lighting equipment.
The shot of the car through the viewer of the second DV camera (below) was particularly hard to film, because we were not able to light the entire car as we had initially hoped.

However, with the torches and video lights we hadwith us, shining both in and out of the car, as well as the brake lights of the car on, we were able to get the shoot we wanted, however it took a lot longer than we had anticipated so we had less time to film to do the rest of the shoot. The slow pan shot of the car was close to impossible to shoot perfectly smoothly without a track and dolly which we did not have, so in the edit we have decided to speed up the slow pan, to make it a fast zoom.
The rest of the filming, mostly shots of Ali waking up in the woods and walking quickly towards the car became far smoother once we
got into into it. We found the wires from microphones, headphones and cameras too difficult to maneuver at our pace, so stopped using them. We also found using a clapperboard tiresome, and although it speeds up editing, we found that with all the equipment in the dark, it slowed down our shoot a bit too much so we stopped using it.

Learnings from the shoot:If filming outside, try to have lighting planned prior to shooting.

• Plan more 'setting up' time to get everybody together and allow for people to be late.
• Give about twice more time for each shot than you think you need.
• Have a safe, dry area to store all expensive equipment when it is not in use, so that people do not always have to hold it.

In conclusion, we were pleased with the footage that we got back from our shoot, and although it was hard work and we had a number of problems, there were no barriers that we didn't eventually solve. We spent more time than p

lanned shooting, but this meant that we didn't have to compromise so much on the quality of the footage.

Below left: struggling to correctly light Ali as he was walking along.
Below right: the clapperboard on our very first take, before we gave up on it.