Review of the last 4 weeks of shooting

1. What have you accomplished in this time?
During the 4 weeks to film we have completed all of our pre-production tasks, all the planning work that had to be done before going out to shoot, writing shot-lists and completing storyboards as well as writing the script, finding locations and actors and every other aspect of planning to shoot a short film.
After having completed the planning work we could then go out and do our first shoot. After having decided on a date that we could all make it to we had to first prepare the location for shooting, as we had to use the dolly this involved having to shift gravel and set down some tracks to try and get the dolly to run smoothly. We First ran through what we wanted to shoot without the actor being there so we knew what to get him to do so we could film efficiently. This worked well and on our first shoot we managed to film the first small section to our film. When we took the footage back to class however we decided to change the story slightly so as to make the acting not so hard for our actor. So within the 4 weeks we have completed all our planning work and shot the first section to our film, and re-shot boarded some of this first scene however some of what we have shot is good and we can use it for our film and so we can now build on what we have already shot.

2. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the work produced?
In the work we have produced so far we have some good shots, the shots we particularly liked were those using objects in both the foreground and the background as, as well as the shots looking good we can also use these types of shots later on to introduce the threat subtly and it should have a scary effect. Our main weakness was the acting was too heavy for the actor and so when he had to look scared this did not work and it just looked comical and so we have had to change this about so as he does not have to do this part of the scene.

3. What problems have you encountered? How are you going to learn from these and deal with them?
The main problem we have encountered is managing to get the whole group together and actors to shoot. To deal with the problem of having to work round the actors schedules as well as our own we have shot/ are planning to shoot seperately the scenes that we can, so the scene with the man at the start we had him there by himself as there is no-one else there with him when he is in the scene. However, working around the groups schedule is difficult although we can work around this as we have done before and should complete the whole of our first shoot by the 7 weeks.

Shannon